Delta blues music is acknowledged as the root from which sprang jazz, R&B;, rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop — in short, every type of American music.
Arkansas can’t lay sole claim to that Delta blues legacy; Mississippi has better positioned itself as home of the blues. But this state can and does lay claim to dozens of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, including so many of the line-blurring artists of the 1950s that a case could be made for Arkansas as the motherland of rock ’n’ roll.
And it is most certainly the home of a ground-breaking radio program, “King Biscuit Time” on KFFA in Helena, that has broadcast the blues directly from its epicenter for six decades.
Arkansas’ unique geographical and cultural schematic has led to much blending and crossover of styles. Its strength could be its weakness in that the term “Arkansas music” carries less of a distinct identity due to its very diversity.
“That’s kind of the middle of the country, right there,” Phillips Countian Levon Helm noted in “The Last Waltz,” Martin Scorsese’s 1978 film about The Band. “So bluegrass or country music, if it comes down to that area, and it mixes then with rhythm and it dances, then you’ve got a combination of all that kind of music — country, bluegrass, blues music, show music.”
Scorsese: “What’s that called?”
Helm: “Rock ’n’ roll.”
Helm could have mentioned a few more genres, like gospel or his beloved rhythm and blues, and still not covered it all.
Louis Jordan of Brinkley urbanized and jumped the blues in the 1940s. In the midst of the big band era, his stripped-down Tympani Five set the prototype in style and substance for the next decade’s R&B; and rock combos.
In addition to his 18 No. 1 hits and more than 50 top 10 records, he influenced such influentials as Chuck Berry, B.B. King, James Brown and Ray Charles. About the same time, Sister Rosetta Tharpe of Cotton Plant exploded a myriad of taboos with her wild electric guitar stylings in a gospel setting. One can hear a generation of future guitar gods in her raw sound; Isaac Hayes and Johnny Cash both claim her influence.
Cash himself is another Arkansawyer who, yes, walked the line between genres. First considered rock, later country — and a member of the halls of fame for both — the Kingsland native quit Sun Records in part because he was not allowed to cut a gospel album.
Charlie Rich of Colt and later, Benton, was likewise a Sun rocker. But he was more comfortable in jazz and soul and apparently came to despise the “countrypolitan” sound that made him rich and famous.
Glen Campbell is another Arkansas product whose own hits defied simple labels. Unlike Cash or even Rich, the onetime Delight/Billstown resident has few young fans who find him edgy or hip — which may change since his well-publicized arrest for drunken driving last November — but he had the chops to perform Brian Wilson’s increasingly complex arrangements as a touring member of the Beach Boys band.
Harold Jenkins, known professionally as Conway Twitty, got his start in rockabilly like so many other country music stars from Arkansas. The distinctive crooner was raised in Phillips County, and he died in 1993 with more No. 1 records than any artist in history.
Al Hibbler, who attended the Arkansas School for the Blind, sang with Duke Ellington for about a decade before he hit solo with “Unchained Melody” — in 1955, a decade before the Righteous Brothers. The next year, Cullendale-born Little Willie John was the first to hit with the R&B; chestnut “Fever,” produced by Hot Springs native Henry Glover.
Johnnie Taylor of Crawfordsville sang gospel before recording a string of top 10 R&B; hits for Stax Records in Memphis, including the Grammy-winning “Who’s Making Love?” In 1976, Taylor had the first platinum single with “Disco Lady.” Al Green of St. Francis and Lee counties has a new album, his first with the lineup that gave him his classic Hi Records hits of the 1970s, right down to his original vocal microphone.
Other Arkansans made their musical marks behind the scene. Blytheville-born Junior Walker had his own hits like “Shotgun” and played sax on many Motown classics and Foreigner’s 1981 hit “Urgent.” West Memphis-born Wayne Jackson did much the same on trumpet for Stax and later, as half of the Memphis Horns and with the Doobie Brothers, Sting and more.
Jesse Belvin played a major hand in the early 1950s West Coast doo-wop scene as a performer but did more as an arranger and writer (“Earth Angel,” “Goodnight My Love”). He is said to have written many other songs and traded the rights for cash.
Belvin’s birthplace may be Texarkana or elsewhere in the state’s southwest, and the circumstances of his death are also subject to debate: He died in a car wreck near Hope in February 1960 just hours after performing a controversial show in Little Rock that attracted an integrated audience to Robinson Auditorium.
Also a talented musician and arranger, the aforementioned Henry Glover (1921-1991) of Hot Springs was producer of Hank Ballard’s R&B; and the country of Grandpa Jones. Glover wrote “California Sun,” “Drown in My Own Tears” and countless others. Besides his credits tracking ground-breaking music, he was country music’s first black record executive.
Eck Robertson, a fiddler born in 1887 in Madison County, is considered to be the first musician recorded playing what is now called country music. Patsy Montana of Jessieville was the first female country artist to have a million-seller.
Fabor Robinson (1911-1986) of Beebe was an independent label owner and agent in the 1950s who steered the careers of Jim Reeves, Johnny Horton and some fellow Arkansans: the Browns (including Jim Ed) and Floyd Cramer (who was born in Louisiana but reared at Huttig).
Allen Reynolds, born in 1938 in North Little Rock, produced Garth Brooks during his commercial height, selling 60 million copies worldwide. The Country Music Hall of Fame calls Little Rock-born Biff Collie (1926-1992) “a pioneer country disc jockey, show promoter and trade promoter.”
And, of course, George W. Hay, founder of the Grand Ole Opry, said he got the idea from watching musicians performing at Mammoth Spring in 1919. On the Stone County Courthouse lawn, this tradition still endures — much like “King Biscuit Time” endures.
Cashing In
While finding talent in the state has never been a problem, creating a profitable Arkansas music industry has been.
Wolf Bayou-born Wayne Raney, a harmonica-blowing hillbilly star of the 1940s and 1950s, sold literally millions of mail-order harmonicas nationwide with partner Lonnie Glosson of Judsonia through their network radio broadcasts. In 1961, Raney launched Rimrock Records in Concord; the label continued more than a decade after his death.
In the mid-1990s, Little Rock band Ho-hum inked a deal with Universal Records, which landed one of the band’s songs in a Sylvester Stallone movie. After their 1996 album “Local” tanked, the band and manager Paul Lovett launched HTS Recordings in Little Rock. The result was 1997’s “Sanduleak,” produced by Barry Poynter. Although local acts make up a fraction of Poynter’s clientele, it has become a sign of coming of age for area bands to record at Poynter’s studio in Little Rock’s Capitol View neighborhood.
When Lovett and Ho-hum parted ways, Ho-hum formed its own label, Playadel Records, to issue albums by the band, beginning with 2000’s “Landau Zeal.”
“Fear of High Rollin’” is Ho-hum’s fourth long-player on its own imprint.
Bassist Rod Bryan, who also owns the record store Athro-Pop in Little Rock, wouldn’t have it any other way. “Now that we record ourselves,” he said, “barring our time spent recording, I’d say we break even selling 300 records ourselves, or 400 through a distributor.”
Meanwhile, Lovett and HTS Recordings continued issuing albums by Little Rock rock bands Mulehead (which has since moved to Little Rock’s Zen Ark imprint), Go Fast and Magic Cropdusters in the late 1990s and measuring success with a couple of thousand units sold per title. Plans to relaunch HTS died when Lovett did in fall 2003.
Burt Taggart’s Max Recordings of Little Rock has issued a series of engaging, anachronistic rock 45s since its January 2002 release of the Big Cats’ single “Fayetteville Blues.”
“We love the vinyl idea,” Taggart explains, “plus because of the relatively inexpensive costs of record pressing, it offers us a chance to get a lot of music out in a relatively short amount of time.”
A 2002 Fast Horse release from Helena-born CeDell Davis, “When Lightnin’ Struck The Pine” — an indie blues release with star power like R.E.M.’s Peter Buck — caused national ripples. Ostensibly based in Denton, Texas, Fast Horse Recordings is a label owned by Joe Cripps, a Grammy-winning musician who still spends much of his time in his hometown of Little Rock.
Late in 2003, Pine Bluff natives Chane Morrow and a Stanford University classmate, Brian Rikuda, opened Conduit Inc., a Little Rock record label. Its first act, hip-hop artist Epiphany, enjoyed song rotation on local radio.
Little Rock and its metro are imbued with a vibrant underground music and arts scene that is rarely captured in state media.
Currently the city’s biggest band, Evanescence, got its start as a duo with Ben Moody and Amy Lee in the late 1990s. The pair had been friends since they were teens. Evanescence filled out its roster and locally released its debut, “Origin,” in 2000 on Bigwig.
The next year, the goth-pop band landed a pair of songs on the “Daredevil” movie soundtrack and issued an album on the major label Wind-Up, “Fallen,” which went triple platinum. Just as the group was becoming the toast of the nation and beyond, primary songwriter Moody abruptly left the band while on tour and returned to Little Rock.
Evanescence picked up best new artist and best hard rock performance awards at the 2004 Grammys. “Fallen” was also nominated for best rock album and Moody and Lee for best rock song — but the team that started it all is no more.
Soul Central
But Arkansas once came close to becoming the soul capital of the South.
According to Black Enterprise magazine in 1974, two of the top five black-owned American businesses were media companies owned by native Arkansawyers — Ebony publisher John H. Johnson and Al Bell, owner of Stax Records.
Brinkley-born Bell took over the reins of Stax after the Memphis-based label produced such hits as Booker T. & the MGs’ “Green Onions” (1962), Rufus Thomas’ “Walking the Dog,” Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’” (1966) and the studded catalog of Otis Redding.
Bell at the helm produced a different chapter of chart success for Stax Records — Johnnie Taylor’s “Who’s Making Love?” (1968), The Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself” (1971), Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff” (1971) — while Isaac Hayes evolved from a staff writer to a “Shaft” superstar.
In July 1969, Stax announced it had sold 10 million singles during the previous year. But despite its continued chart success into the early 1970s, all was not well with the company in Memphis, which was facing a financial crisis due in part to what Bell terms a hostile takeover by distributor CBS.
Needing cash, Bell worked “very closely” with former Arkansas Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller “to put in place the financing to allow us to relocate Stax from Memphis to Little Rock.” Bell said the deal was close to being done when Rockefeller died on Feb. 22, 1973.
Another shot at salvation also died too soon: King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was said to have promised to invest millions in Stax before his March 1975 assassination.
The Stax label dissolved in December 1975. The fading giant had used Rimrock Records’ pressing plant at Concord during its final, desperate days.
In 1978, Bell met with first-term Gov. Bill Clinton about reviving the label in his home state. Bell said Clinton “appreciated the kind of dollars that Stax had cycled through the economy in Memphis,” but he wasn’t able to help.
During this time, Bell said he also “spoke with others around town, and I guess they couldn’t see the vision, or appreciate what I was talking about, or be willing to take what they perceived as a risk associated with doing it.”
Bell hit pay dirt again in 1993 as producer of “Whoomp! There It Is” — at 4 million units, one of the biggest singles of all time.
A few years later, Bell returned to his boyhood home of North Little Rock, the city where he wrote the Staple Singers’ 1972 hit, “I’ll Take You There.” It is still a steady royalty-earner for Bell, who also produced the recording.
Bell, his son Jonathan and other investors established studios and a label, Alpine, concentrating on gospel and hip-hop in unlikely Bryant. The operation is “a free-standing independent record company” that uses subcontractors to produce and distribute the music it produces.
The downswing in the record industry makes this “a great time for an entrepreneur,” Bell said — especially for one who has described his quest to expand the music industry in Arkansas as an obsession.
King Biscuit
If only “Sunshine” Sonny Payne had been so optimistic about “King Biscuit Time.”
Payne worked at KFFA at the inception of “King Biscuit Time” in 1941 and still hosts the Peabody award-winning program six decades later, interrupted only by his World War II service.
“I didn’t think it was gonna go over,” Payne told a Fayetteville audience last year.
In addition to introducing blues to an ever-growing audience, “King Biscuit Time” made a star of Aleck “Rice” Miller (aka Sonny Boy Williamson II) a decade before he’d ever cut a record. Sonny Boy was even honored with his own brand of corn meal, bags of which displayed him atop a giant corn cob, harmonica in hand.
Others heard their first electric guitar on the show, signaling a new era in the blues, courtesy of Robert Lockwood Jr., the de facto stepson of bluesman Robert Johnson. Houston Stackhouse, Joe Willie Wilkins, Robert “Dudlow” Taylor and James “Peck” Curtis all took their turns as King Biscuit Boys on the show.
“King Biscuit Time” — so-named for endorser Interstate Grocery’s locally distributed King Biscuit Flour — was so popular that the inevitable imitators soon took to the airwaves. Robert Nighthawk, the Helena-born slide guitar great, had a competing show hawking Bright Star Flour. By 1943, after two years on “King Biscuit Time,” Turkey Scratch-born Lockwood had his own show promoting Mother’s Best Flour.
Further north, a local farmer known as Howlin’ Wolf did a show on KWEM in West Memphis promoting Hadacol cough syrup.
Helena, already a bustling blues town, began attracting still more bluesmen from throughout the region — Elmore James, Johnny Shines, Muddy Waters, Little Walter and countless others.
Soon, these musicians and their kind of music would travel to Chicago and eventually around the world, influencing generations and laying the foundation for the entirety of modern American sound. But it took some time before the Delta was ready to officially acknowledge its roots.
“Deep Blues,” Little Rock native Robert Palmer’s 1981 book, helped raise scholarly awareness of the genre. In the early 1990s, Palmer further sparked renewed interest in what many saw as a dead music form by producing a unique trio of albums by CeDell Davis, Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside for the Fat Possum label out of Oxford, Miss.
But it is the King Biscuit Blues Festival, billed it as the largest free blues festival in the South, that has brought Helena and its musical history to generations unborn when “King Biscuit Time” broke the mold.
“Forty-five years later, Helena’s essential contribution to the development of modern music is often overlooked, even in Arkansas,” reporter Stephen Buel wrote in Spectrum, a Little Rock alternative weekly newspaper, on the occasion of the first festival in October 1986.
The first several festivals near the levee were scrappy, down-home affairs, with coal dust in the air and folks of every generation and race arm in arm. One could bump into Levon Helm along crowded Cherry Street, say hi to Rufus Thomas or Bill Clinton at the toilet.
With financial difficulties and organizational upheaval, its growth has been rocky at times. The festival has been picketed by locals for alleged racism and questioned by churches for casino sponsorship. The King Biscuit Blues Festival logo, taken from the Sonny Boy Corn Meal logo, was branded offensive by former state Rep. Jimmie Wilson, who said it depicted blacks as “gluttonous … grinning” and “barefoot.” (In fact, the image depicts Sonny Boy Williamson II, wearing shoes and not eating anything.)
The Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism estimated the festival’s 2002 attendance at 80,000, down from late 1990s peaks upward of 100,000.
Whatever the King Biscuit Blues Festival may have lost in folksy charm, it has more than made up for it in size and reputation; it won’t be long behind Arkansas Business in observing its 20th anniversary.
This year’s festival is scheduled for Oct. 7-9. The rest of the year, the Department of Arkansas Heritage’s Delta Cultural Center gives visitors a place to experience viewpoints from the west side of the Mississippi River.
Director Terry Buckalew said the center attracted 22,000 visitors in 2002 and more than 25,000 in 2003. In addition to its exhibits focusing on the area’s musical legacy, the DCC hosts an annual Delta Family Gospel Festival and is a sponsor of the King Biscuit Blues Festival.
But the Delta Cultural Center’s main claim to musical fame is all bound up with radio.
It is from the visitor center at 141 Cherry St. in Helena that Sonny Payne broadcasts “King Biscuit Time” at 12:15 p.m. Monday through Friday.
(Little Rock writer Stephen Koch hosts the award-winning weekly radio segment “Arkansongs,” heard in Little Rock on KUAR FM-89. Koch also performs in the Arkansas music-based quartet The Bug Tussle Boys. In 1997, Koch founded the Louis Jordan Tribute, an annual fund-raising concert/conference recognized by the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame and the Library of Congress.)
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