Rooted in blues for 30 years

The 30th edition of the King Biscuit Blues Festival in downtown Helena-West Helena will feature dozens of acts spanning five stages over four days and nearly 30 vendors.

Headliners Bobby Rush on Thursday, Jimmie Vaughan and Lou Ann Barton on Friday and Taj Mahal on Saturday will cap days chock-full of blues and gospel along Cherry Street. The music begins with the Michael Burks Memorial Jam at 6 p.m. Wednesday.

Fans will stake their claim to spots on the levee in front of the Main Stage to see acts like the Kentucky Headhunters, the Cate Brothers, Marcus "Mookie" Cartwright, Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets, Reba Russell, Earnest "Guitar" Roy and many others, while other acts will perform on the Lockwood Stackhouse Stage, the Gospel Stage, the Front Porch Stage and the Bit-o-Blues Stage.

Entrance to the Main Stage is $30 per day, or $50 for all three days. Shows at all other stages are free, as is the Wednesday night jam.

"It's gonna be a great party," says Linda Broome, the festival's executive director.

It's a far cry from 1986, the year of the blues fest's birth.

Jerry Pillow, the music coordinator for that year and the next 23 editions, reels off the lineup from a poster in his home. It's a Who's Who of Delta blues and enough to cause many roots music fans to salivate: Robert Lockwood Jr., Pinetop Perkins, CeDell Davis, Johnny Shines, Frank Frost, Willie Foster, T-Model Ford, Sam Carr, Funderburgh and Sam Meyers, Bobby "Blue" Bland and James Cotton.

It was a one-day event with bands playing on a stage downtown and Bland and Cotton playing that evening at Lily Peter Auditorium at Phillips County Community College.

"For a first-time festival, that was a pretty significant lineup," Pillow, a Helena native, says. Also on the bill were Blue Diamond, the Unforgettable Blues Band, Self Rising and TBC.

There had been an Octoberfest in downtown Helena in 1985, but Pillow and his blues-fan friends were hoping to create something that reflected the region's musical history. He and his buddy Bubba Sullivan would daydream about such a festival when they were making mix tapes for Sullivan's annual Christmas party.

"We'd spend hours doing that and talking about the blues and music," says Pillow, 68. "We wanted Helena to get a little recognition and we wanted everybody to know that Helena had just as much blues history as any other part of the country."

A big part of that history was King Biscuit Time, the radio show on Helena station KFFA-AM, 1360, that first aired Nov. 21, 1941, and featured harmonica-playing Rice Miller, better known as Sonny Boy Williamson, and Lockwood. The show, which hawked King Biscuit Flour, was one of the first in the South to feature music played live by black musicians and would prove hugely influential. Williamson and Lockwood would eventually record seminal blues albums and a revolving door of musicians, including many on that first festival bill, would play on the program (Williamson died May 24, 1965; Lockwood died Nov. 21, 2006). The show, hosted by "Sunshine" Sonny Payne, won a Peabody Award in 1993 and still airs from 12:15-12:45 p.m. weekdays on KFFA.

Working with the Main Street Helena group, Pillow, Sullivan and a group of volunteers pulled off the first festival relatively unscathed. Attendance was light, maybe a few hundred, Pillow says, and the plan to use proceeds charged for the evening show with Cotton and Bland to break even didn't exactly pan out due to the low attendance. But seeds for the next year were planted by a New York Times writer.

Davis, the slide guitarist from Helena, was first to play at the inaugural festival, Sullivan says, and was joined onstage by Little Rock-born writer Robert Palmer, then a critic for the Times and author of Deep Blues, a skillfully and lovingly chronicled study of blues in the Delta.

"Robert Palmer played the flute, or maybe the clarinet," says Sullivan, 75. "And then, two or three weeks later, there's a story in The New York Times. Man, if you can make The New York Times, that's what really got things going here."

The Oct. 23, 1986, article, "Critic's Notebook: Blues Lives at King Biscuit Festival," lists the history of the radio program and references Helena's own character.

"These are remarkable events," Palmer wrote of the festival and the resurgence of the radio program after being off the air a few years in the early '80s, "instances of an isolated community understanding its own collective identity clearly enough to buck trends that are dominant in American culture. But then, Helena, founded in 1833, is at least a quarter-century older than any other Delta town of comparable size. Even the current tourism campaign promotes downtown Helena as a kind of time warp. The town has always done things its own way."

As for the music, Palmer, who died Nov. 20, 1997, was equally enthused. "Robert Lockwood, the only survivor of the original King Biscuit Time musicians, played his music and that of his Delta blues mentor, Robert Johnson, on a different instrument, an electric 12-string guitar, in order to bring out the music's implicit overtone structures and resonances. He deftly inserted passing chords derived from jazz, revealing what it is that links the harmonic systems of European classical music and the black American vernacular, and what sets them apart ... each performance was also a key for unlocking the self; each experience enabled one to learn to listen to music all over again."

By 1987, the festival was entirely free and the crowd was significantly larger.

"There were thousands of people," Pillow says. "It blew our minds. And the third year was even bigger." Talk of attendance reaching 100,000 was prevalent in those early years, but it was hard to get an accurate count since no tickets were sold.

Last year's edition, which had a fair share of rain, had about 30,000 people, says Broome, the executive director.

Those first years were filled with lots of "stumbling around in the dark" for organizers, says Pillow, who was at Williamson's final show in Wabash (Phillips County) just before the bluesman's death in 1965.

"But it got easier. We knew what other festivals were doing and we would read the magazines. We knew what was happening and we wanted to give recognition to artists from this area. After the first year, we decided it should be a free festival put on for the community and we would bring in the people we thought were important. We weren't worried about the box office because there wasn't a box office. It was free."

Pillow, Sullivan and other blues fans started the Sonny Boy Blues Society in 1988, whose volunteers help organize the festival. Extra days and stages were added and a permanent Main Stage was eventually constructed facing the levee at the south end of Cherry Street.

The festival chugged along until 2005, when New York-based King Biscuit Entertainment, the owners of King Biscuit Flower Hour as well as a syndicated rock radio show and the King Biscuit trademark, wanted to charge the festival for use of the name. Organizers refused and the King Biscuit Blues Festival was renamed the Arkansas Blues and Heritage Festival.

In 2009, the festival began charging admission and in 2011 the original name was restored.

The one constant, though, has been the music.

And Funderburgh and the Rockets.

Look back at that first lineup from 1986 and you'll see the Texas-born guitarist is listed with his band and harmonica player Sam Meyers. A perusal of this year's acts shows him on the Main Stage from 5:20-6:30 p.m. Friday. Indeed, Funderburgh has played each of the festival's previous 29 years.

"It's become such a big part of my life," the guitarist says from his McKinney, Texas, home. "Everybody has become like family, and for me it's like one big family reunion when I come back. I've known them for so long now. I've got friends in Memphis and Little Rock and Fayetteville and I see them every year when we play the Biscuit."

On the opposite end of that spectrum is first-time performer Jimmie Vaughan -- the former Fabulous Thunderbird and brother to Stevie Ray -- who headlines Friday night with Barton starting at 8:25 on the Main Stage.

"We haven't had many Austin, Texas, musicians here in a while and he's an incredible guy," Sullivan says of Vaughan. "He does a really good show."

Bobby Rush will headline the Main Stage on Thursday beginning at 8:30 p.m. Roots music legend and festival veteran Mahal will perform Saturday night starting at 8:30 on the Main Stage.

"He's just magic onstage," Sullivan says of Rush. "He can get people really going when nobody else can. He's just incredible."

Sullivan, the owner of Bubba's Blues Corner in downtown Helena-West Helena, also recommends fans check out the Texas folk blues of Ruthie Foster, who plays Saturday before Mahal on the Main Stage -- "She's killer," he says -- and also recommends his pals the Kentucky Headhunters, of "Dumas Walker" fame whose most recent album, this year's Meet Me in Bluesland, was recorded with Chuck Berry's longtime pianist and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Johnnie Johnson.

After the Wednesday night jam session, music begins early each day -- at noon Thursday and an almost unblueslike 9 a.m. Friday and Saturday -- and ranges from electric, Chicago-style blues to acoustic blues, gospel and most musical stops in between. Visitors can watch Payne host King Biscuit Time at his studio in the Delta Cultural Center, 141 Cherry St., on Thursday and Friday and can also take in performances and lectures at the center's Front Porch Stage.

Food ranging from gyros to turkey legs, tamales, grilled corn, barbecue and more will be sold by vendors, and souvenirs will also be for sale. Vendors accept blues bucks, so visitors are encouraged to bring cash to buy blues bucks at locations along Cherry Street.

Area hotels fill up quickly, but campers can stay at the Helena-West Helena Fire Department's Tent City in the Helena River Park just across the levee on Cunningham Road. Fee is $70 and sites are given on a first-come, first-served basis. Call (870) 817-7442 for information.

Style on 10/04/2015