Page 63 - Blues Festival Guide Magazine 2018

Blues Festival Guide Publisher Kaati (right) and her sister Julia (left) visiting long-time King Biscuit Time host “Sunshine” Sonny Payne at the KFFA station
Biscuit Time, opening each broadcast with “Pass the biscuits! It’s sitting up there on the back. They’d be beating on the piano
King Biscuit Time” and playing classic blues mixed with newer and the rest would be picking and singing.”
tracks. The show then expanded to a half hour and aired each King Biscuit Time was beaming into homes and businesses,
weekday from 12:15–12:45 pm. Health permitting, Sonny presenting essentially live sets by Sonny Boy Williamson, a singer
continued to host the show until he passed away in February of and harmonica player who, by 1941, had already played with
this year. the "Father of the Blues" Robert Johnson, Elmore James and
King Biscuit Time gave the city of Helena, the state of Robert Nighthawk. Sonny Boy brought Robert Johnson’s stepson
Arkansas and Delta blues in general a much larger audience Robert Lockwood Jr. and keyboard wizard Pinetop Perkins with
beyond the sharecroppers, juke joint patrons and record him into the studio and went on to tour the world, performing and
buyers, and almost immediately changed the paradigm of recording “real” blues with rock stars he’d influenced, including
how blues was presented and promoted. Jim Howe became Eric Clapton of The Yardbirds, Eric Burden of The Animals, and
the owner of KFFA in 1951. He comes from a family that for Robbie Robertson of The Band.
generations owned a lumber company on thousands of acres Long after Sonny Boy Williamson died in 1965, the show
of land in nearby Wabash: “I remember the King Biscuit Boys continued to feature blues artists as guests, as well as pop music
coming to the Wabash store. They’d holler ‘The King Biscuit icons like Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, Elvis Costello and Billy
Boys are over there.’ We’d run across the railroad tracks Gibbons of ZZ Top – illustrating the influence that blues, and
and go and listen. That was part of the sponsoring with Mr. the show in particular, have had on music around the world.
Moore. He said, ‘On weekends I want you all to go down to As a youngster, Levon Helm, who went on to form The Band,
these country stores and advertise King Biscuit Flour.’ They’d used to take the only elevator in Arkansas up to the fifth floor
come down in the old truck, of the Helena National Bank building and sit cross-legged in
and they had a piano sitting the studio as Sonny Boy, Lockwood, Pinetop Perkins, Houston
on the back of the truck. It Stackhouse and drummer James “Peck” Curtis played live on
weighed about 400 lbs. the air. Muddy Waters was also among those tuning in.
As small as this tiny radio station is, it was located in what
King Biscuit Time entertainers (l to r) at the time was a critical port city on the mighty Mississippi
Sonny Boy Williamson, Frank Frost
and Sam Carr. Photo courtesy of the River, a gateway to America’s heartland from New Orleans
Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and to Minnesota. Noted musicologist Dennis McNally writes
Visual History, University of Arkansas
in his epic history of American music Highway 61 – Music,

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