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Old 08-30-2014, 11:38 AM   #2 (permalink)
Lord Larehip
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Join Date: Jun 2013
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In the meantime, kids needed to hear some new music and started tuning into radio programs as the King Biscuit Time. Hosted from Helena, Arkansas on station KFFA starting in 1942, as a promotional spot for the King Biscuit Flour Company, the program and its sponsor was very anxious to sell baking goods to the large black population in the area who were generally excluded by other advertisers.

They decided a blues program on a radio station that was also playing more and more black artists for an increasingly black listenership would be a good way to reach out to them. King Biscuit Time was hosted by harpist Aleck “Rice” Miller and guitarist Robert “Junior” Lockwood, stepson of Robert Johnson. The program aired every weekday at 12:15 in the afternoon and lasted 15 minutes. The promoters figured this was the optimal time of day because most workers were on lunch break and would have the time to tune in without interruption. The latest blues recordings and artists would be featured who would play a live segment with the house band.

What made King Biscuit Time even more revolutionary was that Lockwood and house guitarist Houston Stackhouse played electric guitars and Miller held his harp against the mike making it rasp and howl in a way impossible without a mike. In other words, the show featured electric blues. Up to then, blues was always played on acoustic guitars and the harp was not amplified. King Biscuit Time added a new dimension to blues music.

While some credit the program as having invented electric blues, others give that credit to T-Bone Walker who started recording electric blues that same year for the newly formed Capitol label in L.A. Regardless, King Biscuit Time became hugely popular (in fact, it is still running to this day—the longest running radio program in the world, it has never been off the air since its creation). Rice Miller’s transformation of blues harp was considered so essential to the form that he was awarded the name Sonny Boy Williamson II after his hero (generally, it was bad form to take the name of an earlier artist if he or she was a legend but an exception was made for Miller who became so well known as Sonny Boy Williamson that it often causes confusion when trying to figure out whether the real one was meant or Miller).


King Biscuit Time radio hosts Houston Stackhouse, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) and James “Peck” Curtis.


The King Biscuit Time band in the studio with the addition of Robert “Junior” Lockwood on guitar (Robert Johnson’s stepson) and Pinetop Perkins on piano. Every bag of flour bore Williamson’s image. This was one of the first corporate attempts to market a mainstream product aimed squarely at blacks and it paid off.

King Biscuit Time was not only enormously popular among blacks but young white kids looking for new musical kicks as well including some kid named Elvis Something-or-other. Williamson, however, left KFFA in 1947 and was now employed by KWEM in Memphis and enjoyed a very high listenership.
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