Influence and Related Projects
The popularity of the program made Helena a major blues center. Helena became a stopping place for blues musicians on their way from the Delta region to the Chicago blues nightclubs and was also convenient to Memphis, Tennessee and its lively blues culture. Several blues musicians came to Helena and made it their home, such as Little Walter Jacobs and Jimmy Rogers.
King Biscuit Time was also a major breakthrough for African-American music in general. The popularity of the program and its reach into the untapped African-American demographic gained notice and spawned a host of imitators. By 1947 the first black disc jockey in the South, Early Wright, had been signed at WROX across the river. WDIA in Memphis soon became the first radio station in the South with an all black staff (including deejay B.B. King) and musical format based on the success of King Biscuit Time.
The King Biscuit Flower Hour is a one hour syndicated rock and roll radio program the name of which was derived from King Biscuit Time. Levon Helm, drummer for The Band, has credited King Biscuit Time, and in particular James Peck Curtis, for inspiring his musical career. In 1986 the first annual King Biscuit Blues Festival (later renamed to Arkansas Blues and Heritage Festival and returned to King Biscuit Blues Festival in 2011) was held in Helena, attracting thousands of blues aficionados from around the world. A magazine spin-off, King Biscuit Time edited by Donald Wilcock, has won several awards from the Blues Foundation, including the "Keeping the Blues Alive Award", and features interviews and biographies of major blues personalities.
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“It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“So universal and widely related is any transcendent moral greatness, and so nearly identical with greatness everywhere and in every age,—as a pyramid contracts the nearer you approach its apex,—that, when I look over my commonplace-book of poetry, I find that the best of it is oftenest applicable, in part or wholly, to the case of Captain Brown.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)