In Helena, Arkansas, the biscuits sing the blues.
As it turns out, the ones that were made with King Biscuit Flour actually had a hand in birthing them – the blues, that is. The American South of the 1940’s was just emerging from The Great Depression when a small radio station in Helena, which sits on the banks of the Mississippi River, began broadcasting a show called King Biscuit Time, featuring live studio musicians. At the time, their names were known only to the locals, but that didn’t last long. Sonny Boy Williamson II, Robert Lockwood, Pinetop Perkins and James Piper Curtis are today largely regarded as some of the founding fathers of the blues.
The story goes that Williamson convinced the owners of Helena’s radio station, KFFA, along with sponsor King Biscuit Flour and their distributor, the Interstate Grocer Company, to finance the show in exchange for the advertising and naming rights. At the time, KFFA was the only radio station that would play African-American music. Williamson’s pitch worked, and King Biscuit Time was born. It still lives, by the way, and is the longest running radio show anywhere, period, the end. Because KFFA had a reach that extended across the Mississippi Delta, it didn’t take long for those delicious notes to begin influencing an entire region. Among the faithful listeners every day were two men, B.B. King and Muddy Waters, who each would reportedly come home from working in the fields just to listen to the show. Beyond those two, who went on to become legends, the blues quickly took hold, took off, and has never looked back.
Meanwhile, Helena’s fortunes began to wane. Loss of industry began to take a toll, people began moving away, and pretty soon the little town on the banks of the Mississippi found itself struggling to survive. Enter the King Biscuit Blues Festival, inspired by the local Helena radio show that started it all. It was founded in 1986 by a community group dedicated to revitalization, and aside from a brief fork in the road when the King Biscuit brand name was removed from the event (before recently being restored), the festival has now become legendary itself. Tens of thousands of faithful blues fans converge on Helena each October to celebrate a genre of music that is not only uniquely American, but authentically Southern as well.
If you’re over that way in October, you should go. I’m guessing it doesn’t get much better than the sounds of a blues guitar wafting out over the waters of the Mississippi in the very cradle where the music was born.
Next best thing, I guess, might be to listen to a bit of the blues right here. It can’t hurt.
Photo of blues guitar via AY Magazine, Photo of B.B. King via Memphis One
Photo of King Biscuit Blues Festival, bottom of page, via Arkansas Daily Deal
Photo of festival at top of post, source unknown.