KFFA, Helena's first local radio station, was only days on the air when a harmonica player came in with a business plan. Sonny Boy Williamson, born Aleck Miller, wanted to promote his upcoming gigs, and he wanted the noon slot, when the Delta's working audience took its lunch break. That is how Edward Komara, who wrote the Library of Congress essay on the show, tells it. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas adds that Williamson and guitarist Robert Lockwood Jr. took the idea to station owner Sam Anderson, who sent them to Max Moore, owner of the Interstate Grocer Company. Moore saw the possibilities of marketing to African Americans and agreed to pay if the two would endorse his King Biscuit Flour.
Fifteen minutes
King Biscuit Time went on the air at 12:15 p.m. on November 21, 1941. Lockwood, born at Turkey Scratch on the Phillips and Lee county line, had learned guitar from Robert Johnson. The success was immediate, and the pair kept the weekday slot. Over the 1940s a band formed behind Williamson: guitarists Joe Willie Wilkins, Earl Hooker and Houston Stackhouse, pianists Robert "Dudlow" Taylor, Willie Love and Pinetop Perkins, and drummer Peck Curtis. The encyclopedia says he apparently first used the name Sonny Boy Williamson on this show, though another harmonica player, John Lee Williamson of Chicago, already held it, and scholars have been sorting out the two ever since. In 1947 Interstate put Williamson's likeness on a cornmeal bag, seated on an ear of corn.
The band and the road
Sam Anderson and Hugh Smith announced at first. Sonny Payne filled in once in 1941, came back in 1951 and hosted until his death in 2018. Lockwood left for Chicago in 1950. Williamson, whose birth year sources give as 1899 or 1912, made his first records in 1951 for Trumpet in Jackson, Mississippi. Chess bought his contract in 1954, and he toured England and Europe. By early 1965, in poor health, he came home to Helena and the show. Curtis found him dead in his boarding house room on May 25, 1965.
The one tape
Only one episode is known to survive. In May 1965 Chris Strachwitz recorded the studio session straight to tape, with Williamson, Stackhouse and Curtis playing and Payne audible from his booth. Payne opens by selling "Clean, fluffy and white King Biscuit Flour," and later spends a long break on the ten-pound bag and the Sonny Boy meal. Before his last number, Williamson reminds listeners that tonight is a big night in Greenwood, Mississippi, and Komara points out that this was why he began the program 23 years earlier. The recording is in the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry.
The live band went off the air in 1968, when records replaced it. Moore died in 1979 and the show stopped, then returned in 1986 with Payne. It is still broadcast at 12:15 on weekdays from the Delta Cultural Center in Helena, where the Delta Sounds gallery sets the music in its region. A visit timed for noon catches the long run of that deal: a flour sponsor, a harmonica and a lunch hour.