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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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FESTIVAL SPECIAL
ARKANSAS BLUES AND HERITAGE FESTIVAL
- PART ONE
Helena, Arkansas, October 9th-11th, 2008 |
| We’ve
crossed the Mississippi to Helena, Arkansas. The
reason we’re here is Aleck “Rice”
Miller, otherwise known as Sonny Boy Williamson
(the second), arguably the greatest and most influential
blues harmonica player. This once busy and prosperous
river port was a regular haunt for blues artists
- its bars, brothels and jook joints offering multiple
opportunities to make some cash. |
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| Robert
Johnson lived here towards the end of his short
life. Williamson, who played with Johnson, and is
one of the few sources of the largely hearsay information
that exists about his death, began broadcasting
on a local radio station here in 1941, along with
guitarist Robert Lockwood Jnr. (Johnson’s
son). |
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| Known
as “King
Biscuit Time” – it was
sponsored by the manufacturers of King Biscuit Flour
- it was the first blues radio show – with
a live studio performance format that lasted for
almost thirty years, witnessing a procession of
now legendary players through its door. It brought
Williamson, and others like him, to the attention
of recording studios, thus bringing the blues to
a wider world. |
 |
| And
it’s still broadcast today, by veteran DJ
Sonny Payne, (who started working on the show in
1953) from the Delta Cultural Centre on Cherry Street.
To celebrate this achievement, the King Biscuit
Blues Festival was established in 1986. |
| Now
known as the Arkansas
Blues and Heritage Festival (somewhat
to the chagrin of old timers, who whilst happy to
take State funding to support the event, appear
to resent the loss of the original name. What many
still seem to delight in referring to seditiously
as “the Biscuit” is now the largest
free blues festival in the world, running over three
stages over three days. During which, this largely
forgotten and derelict town (many main street shops
are empty and boarded up, but if you visit, do call
in to the Gist Music Company, where we enjoyed a
marvellous conversation and for some reason bought
a washboard) is transformed into a vibrant throng
of over 100,000 people. Visitors coming from all
over the United States (and the world) mix with
after-work and weekend locals, filling its streets.
Food vendors offer a variety of preposterous cholesterol-fuelled
dishes, under the disapproving but visibly ineffective
(if our plates were anything to go by) eye of a
stall promoting healthy eating, run by the Government’s
‘Nutrition Intervention Research Initiative’.
And busking musicians line the street, playing for
tips, and selling a multiplicity of CDs. |
 |
| Am
I wrong, or is this Blues Heaven? |
| The
main stage is on the levee – and you might
be forgiven at first sight for thinking that it’s
really just Cropredy by the Mississippi. Grey hairs,
grey beards, pot-bellies and fishing chairs abound
(along with the obligatory coolers). Veterans proudly
wear their oldest Biscuit shirts, many are sitting
in the same places that they’ve occupied for
years (some simply chain their chairs down to the
old railway lines that run through the auditorium
and leave them there for three days) and there’s
a friendly and familiar air about the place that
makes it altogether agreeable. If they’ve
one grumble (apart from the heat, of course) it’s
that the line-up “isn’t as traditional”
as it’s been in the past. That of course raises
some interesting questions. The Festival has hosted
a variety of local blues legends in the past, but
the fact remains that they are becoming few and
far between, and there is a uncomfortable sense
of voyeurism in the air as the crowd fawn on those
ageing stars who do appear on the bill, desperately
trying to get their photographs before, as it were,
they check out. |
|
Mudbone
(L) and Terry 'Harmonica' Bean (R) |
| But
I could see what some of the very hospitable people
we talked with meant. There was a tendency in many
of the acts towards an almost formulaic blues-rock
which meant that after three days it was hard to
tell some of them apart. On the first day, there
were some outstanding young award-winning acts,
such as Trampled
Under Foot (winners of the 2008 International
Blues Challenge): two brothers and a sister (with
two left-handed guitarists) from Kansas, featuring
some outstanding guitar playing from Nick Schnebelen.
There was a curiosity from Moscow (Russia), Arsen
Shomakhov, 2007’s Emerging Artist Winner,
who played text-book riffs very nicely until he
made a mistake, from which he invariably had great
difficulty recovering. |
|
Trampled
Under Foot (L) and Hamilton Loomis (R) |
| Webb
Wilder played some nice and good-humoured country-tinged
blues-rock, and brought a whoop of “Nick Lowe!”
from the crowd when he played ‘Ju ju man’,
whilst Tinsley
Ellis responded with a harder-edged rock sound
and but some lamentably flat singing. Earlier local
favourite, the hard-drinkin’ and hard talkin’
Reba Russell
had delighted the crowd with her powerful singing
and earthy lyrics (‘Toolbox blues’ should
speak for itself). But I have to say that by day
two, artistes such as Louisiana’s Hamilton
Loomis (a protégé of the late
Bo Diddley), Chicago’s soulful Carl
Weathersby, New Orleans’ Mem
Shannon and the Membership, and Michael
Burks were beginning to merge somewhat seamlessly
into a fairly predictable groove. This despite the
fact that Shannon and Burks in particular were both
excellent guitarists, the former from New Orleans
leaning towards the blues, the latter a local Arkansas
favourite towards heavier rock. |
|
Carl
Weathersby (L) and Tinsley Ellis (R) |
| The
Revue-style format of the closing acts on the first
two days - The Champions of R&B, featuring Earl
Gaines, Johnny Jones and Al Garner, and the Severn
Records Soul and Blues Revue with Lou Pride, Darrell
Nulisch and Tad Robinson - also left some of the
regulars yearning for the big names of yore. As
it happens, they were not to be disappointed.
(To be continued...) - Nick Morgan (photographs
by Kate) |
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