People

This project traces Lockwood’s connections to the Delta blues, the influence of his daily radio program on King Biscuit Time on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas and his life as a northern bluesman in Chicago and Cleveland. In tracing Lockwood’s life and career, it also traces the larger trajectory of the blues and the great migration. Following Clyde Woods, it explores the geographic contours and epistemological contributions of the traveling Delta, its people and sounds transforming the contours of the urban north, while themselves facing an uneven terrain of urban development. Rather than relegating the blues to a genre of another time and place, this project asks how the persistence of Lockwood’s blues helps us understand intergenerational connections in what Jordan Camp calls “the poetry of social movements.
Grant: $1,500