Rumors swirled for months that the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena was dead. There were plenty of reasons to believe such rumors. The Trump administration had gutted the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, making funding more difficult to obtain for arts and entertainment organizations.

Meanwhile, the continued loss of population across the Arkansas Delta drained the region of businesses that once supported the event. It also depleted its pool of volunteers as community-minded Delta residents headed in retirement to the Little Rock area, the Memphis area and northwest Arkansas to be near their grandchildren. Other stalwarts such as Bubba Sullivan and Sonny Payne died.

Organizers finally announced in June that what blues fans know simply as "the Biscuit" will be back this fall. What had been a three-day festival has been scaled back to two days on Oct. 10-11. But the Biscuit, though on life support, lives on thanks to a dedicated group of people who refuse to let it die.

In its early days, the festival was held on the back of a flatbed truck parked in front of a former Missouri Pacific depot that now houses the Delta Cultural Center. The first event was in 1986. Within a few years, it was attracting people from around the world. After all, the blues are bigger in Europe than in North America.

"What began as a one-day event with a crowd of 500 became a three-day event with tens of thousands of people attending," Richard Allen Burns writes for the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas. "Hotels and motels had few vacancies on festival weekends. The festival soon sprawled well beyond its 1986 boundaries. By 2013, there were six stages. Musicians were booked not only on the main stage but also on ones that included gospel choirs and other groups in addition to artists who performed more traditional Delta blues.

"One stage was called the Houston Stackhouse Stage in the morning and the Robert Junior Lockwood Stage........

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