Page 62 - Blues Festival Guide Magazine 2018

ARkAnsAs BluEs

in thE DiRt & on thE AiR

The Delta Sounds exhibit at the Delta Cultural Center features the blues legends influential to the music of the Arkansas Delta. Photo courtesy of the Delta Cultural Center
By Don Wilcock sang blues, and I could sing pretty good. They would always tip
As a teenager, B.B. King was still working in the cotton fields me. Driving tractor was one of the highest paying jobs for farm
of Indianola, MS, but on lunch break he would listen to Sonny hands, and they paid $22.50 a week. So, when I’d go to town
Boy Williamson (II) and his King Biscuit Entertainers on KFFA-FM and sit on the street corner and play, sometimes I’d make $50 or
1360 out of Helena, AR, a hundred miles away. “I used to listen $60. I have made as high as $100 one evening. Now, you see
to KFFA every day. I was in the fields plowing, [the King Biscuit why I’m a blues singer?”
Time show] did good for me ’cause I enjoyed it.” King Biscuit Time continues to broadcast Delta blues music
B.B. was 16 when the show came on the air in 1941. to this day, chalking up more than 17,600 episodes. That’s
The program was the first to feature African American artists more than the Grand Ole Opry – making it not only the first live
performing live on the air for 15 minutes at lunch time. It was blues show, but the longest running music show in the world.
a clarion call to the world that blues was more than a local It was a springboard for harmonica player and singer Sonny
phenomenon confined to Saturday night fish fries and chitlin Boy Williamson, guitarist Robert Lockwood Jr., pianist Pinetop
circuit juke joints. King Biscuit Time emanating from Helena, Perkins and many others who performed live on the air in the
a world port on the Mississippi River, was facilitating an earliest days.
expansion of the genre that would soon influence popular music Sunshine Sonny Payne was 17 when he first went to work at
worldwide and offer at least the hint of a way out of poverty for the station in 1941: “When we started the radio station, we had
African Americans toiling on southern cotton plantations. B.B. and all of ’em coming there out of the fields. They heard
B.B. worked in the field from “can to can’t.” In other words, it on the radio. When KFFA went on the air in 1941, Interstate
from the time you can see until you can’t. King Biscuit Time was Grocery owner Max Moore told Sonny Boy Williamson if he
turning B.B. and a growing number of people onto the blues. He sold a railroad car of King Biscuit Flour, he’d sponsor him on
started busking in the streets. “People would come up and ask if the air for $12.50 a week,” recalls Sonny.
I would play a blues. I knew some, and some I pretended, but I By 1951, Sonny Payne had become the full-time host of King

60 Blues Festival Guide 2018