A “Blues on the Farm” panel at the Carnegie Public Library was one of the main events to open the Pre-King Biscuit Blues Festival on Wednesday.
The King Biscuit Blues Festival is in its 38th year in Helena-West Helena, Ark. It normally runs Wednesday through Saturday. Due to financial issues, KBBF is only Friday and Saturday this year.
In an effort to keep things running, a Pre-King Biscuit Blues Festival began on Wednesday in Clarksdale and runs through Friday morning.
Musician Lucious Spiller opened things by playing outside of the library on Wednesday afternoon. The “Blues on the Farm” panel followed. Musician Deak Harp played outside of Deak’s Mississippi Saxophone & Blues Emporium. A Delta Fusion Cooking Class was at the Shack Up Inn. A Mississippi Welcome Party at Hopson Commissary closed events on Wednesday.
Chalk Mitchell represented KBBF in Helena-West Helena and spoke briefly before the “Blues on the Farm” panel began.
“I’d like, like to thank you for what you’ve done to bring our two cities together,” said Mitchell to Clarksdale for having a Pre-King Biscuit Blues Festival.
“We are only 30 something miles apart, and we’re both small rural communities and its interstate blues came in the heart of it. I hear that somebody that said, somebody told ‘em, go see the Crossroads. And that’s basically amazing.
“I thank Clarksdale for giving us a second life. We are too young to die. Thirty-eight years old. That’s right.”
King Biscuit Hour host and Delta Cultural Center director Thomas Jacques told the story of the biscuit during the panel.
“I’ve had, I’ve had people come in and ask me if I’m the King before,” Jacques said. “King Biscuit time started in 1941 with a new radio station in Helena. A gentleman named Sam Anderson had been the superintendent of schools up at Dyess Colony. That’s where Johnny Cash is. Family would go during the depression. And he (Anderson) was the superintendent up there, and he had watched a radio station go in at Jonesboro, Arkansas. And Sam was trying to figure out how to make a little bit more money than a superintendent, even though he was probably one of the best paid superintendents since it was part of the federal program at the time in Arkansas. And he was from Holly Grove initially.”
Holly Grove is a rural community in Monroe County, Ark., not far from Helena, which was seen as a high point on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River.
“And if he (Anderson) could get a radio station going in this pretty thriving little river town, he would be doing OK,” Jacques said. “And so he went in with a couple of other fellas. He, Sam went in with Bill from, Floyd Trucking, and another gentleman whose name, I forget it the moment, who had the ice company in town and they formed a radio station.”
The radio station was KFFA.
“Two bluesmen show up named Alec Rice Miller and Robert Lockwood Jr.,” Jacques said. “Rice Miller is a harmonica player. He has played with a lot of the guys throughout the Delta.
“He was an itinerant Bluesman in the 1930s.”
Lockwood Jr. had initially been a piano player, but his mother started dating guitar player Robert Johnson.
“And Robert (Johnson) taught Robert (Lockwood) how to play guitar,” Jacques said.
Lockwood went to Chicago and did recording one summer.
“This is the fall of 1941 and longer he should be,” Jacques said. “And so he comes back to town and Rice Miller’s excited this season. He’s in town because, you know, the harmonica player needs a guitar player. And he said, ‘I’ve got this, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go down to this new radio station and we’re going to ask them for a show. We can tell people we’ll be playing that evening. We’ll be over and Friars Point, we’ll be in Ash, we’ll be in Lawrenceville. We’ll be at all points in between.’ And Robert Lockwood thought that would be a good idea. Now, Rice Miller had been on radio for just a little bit up in southern Illinois, not far from St. Louis. And he had been on the radio and he noticed that he had a lot more attention. Remember, you gotta realize how new mass communications were at that time. Robert Johnson seemed to be one of the first bluesmen that were around and listened to records at Juke Joints and, and learned from all over the country rather than just those inter intermediate areas. So radio was a new idea. When Rice Miller started noticing he had bigger crowds, once he’d been on the radio, he’d say hey, this is the way to go. So they auditioned for Sam Anderson, and Sam said, you guys are good. And Sam Anderson was, I don’t know if he’s a social progressive, but he was definitely an economic progressive. He recognized that with the African American population in Phillips County that was 71% African American and could not have a lily white radio
station, which a lot of the community did not understand why he didn’t want that. And he was saying, well, these folks come in toward your hundred dollars that slowly had to crank through a few mines in town. But he went to Interstate Grocery Company, and Sam was a thinker on this because Interstate Grocers Company supplied all those grocery stores throughout the countryside in a heavily laborious industry of agriculture. Agriculture required all these folks who would stop homesteads. You didn’t have the large mechanized agricultural production that you would later have. Instead you had all these family farms, all these sharecropping operations, tenant farmers, day laborers, and they all went into these stores.
“They were either company stores or mom and pop operations, and Interstate Grocery company supplied all of those stores. So he went in and talked to the head of this place, the owner’s name was Max Moore. And he said, you know, max, what’s not selling very well? And he said, oh, well, I got this house brand of flour. I’ve been trying to, you know, get people to buy for about 10 years now, and it’s called King Biscuit Flour.
“That’s what King Biscuit is.”
Dr. Mandy Truman, director at the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University, is a geographer and talked about her research on the panel.
“So do you guys know where the New Roxy Theater is?” she said. “So this is across the train tracks, south of the train tracks. And this is originally what was, in one portion of town, where businesses were open…And so my research focused a lot really about, rather than looking at the Great Migration, more broadly, as you know, African Americans in the South and going to the cities of the urban areas of the north across the country, looking at that on a smaller scale. And so looking at the farmers and sharecroppers that left just these local rural areas and moved into rural history, they brought with them these traditions, the tradition of community building. So all of those things were left to the farm and came with them to the rural district.”
Tracy Caradine, director of Carnegie Public Library, talked about the library’s role in letting people know about historical events.
“I had been away for about 30 years working in as a school librarian and also as an academic librarian in Texas,” she said. “And I kind of made my way back around and came back home to be the director of the Carnegie Public Library. So I’ve been here for 30 years now and made a lot of changes. And we listen to our community to try and develop programming that they won because, as you know, now, libraries have competition. And so we have to really pay attention to what our citizens want and try to bring what they want to them in various formats to keep the library alive and people coming in.”
Colleen Buyers of Shared Experiences, who helped lead the effort to for the Pre-KBBF to be in Clarksdale this year, was on the panel and introduced Spiller before he played.
“Lucious is originally from Arkansas and has made Clarksdale his home for the last many years,” Buyers said. “When you come to Clarksdale on a Wednesday night, on a Sunday night, on a Friday night, if you’re lucky, you’ll see Lucious playing in all of our venues around town.
“The biggest is one of the biggest, oldest, most legendary blues festivals in the entire world. It means so much to us to have the King Biscuit Festival happening in Helena and the whole Delta.”
The goal is to have the full KBBF in Helena-West Helena next year.
Tourists provided some of their thoughts.
Diana Conwell and Philbo Koenig are a married couple from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and have been coming to KBBF and the Juke Joint Festival in April for 10 years. They stay at a suite in the Uptown Inn when they come to both festivals.
“It’s the music, friendly people and the food are awesome,” Conwell said.
On having a Pre-KBBF, Conwell said, “It’s kind of confusing actually.”
Conwell said she hopes having a Pre-KBBF will keep KBBF going next year. She has seen many of the same people through the years and made a lot of friends in Clarksdale and Helena-West Helena.
“I like it,” she said. “There’s a lot of diverse people that come across the globe like Australia. A bunch of people that we met from Amsterdam and Germany. Ten years that we’ve been coming, we always meet international people and diverse people from the states.”
Koenig also wants to keep KBBF going.
“If there’s tourists around with money, they should tap them, collect it and keep things going,” he said.
Koenig said he hopes to have a full King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena-West Helena next year, but he understood the financial issues.
“It’s hard times because the Republicans are running (things),” he said. “That’s why the blues are so healthy because everybody’s got the blues.”
A full schedule of this week’s festival events can be found at https://www.facebook.com/share/1Wc2Qpmive/.
