Helena, AR

Helena, Arkansas — not the Montana capital: the venue settles it — may be the most musical small town on the Mississippi. From the KFFA studios here, King Biscuit Time has broadcast the blues every weekday since 1941, the longest-running daily blues radio programme in the world; Sonny Boy Williamson II played it live for years, and every October the King Biscuit Blues Festival brings tens of thousands to the levee for one of the great blues gatherings on earth. The Delta Cultural Center downtown tells the story of the river country that produced this music, in a town that also saw one of the Civil War's fiercest small battles in 1863.

The archive's stage carries the name of an Arkansas legend: the Lily Peter Auditorium at Phillips Community College, home of the long-running Warfield Concert Series, was built with the gift of Lily Peter — cotton farmer, state poet laureate, Juilliard-trained violinist and the philanthropist who once brought the Philadelphia Orchestra to Arkansas entirely at her own expense. Her hall still brings orchestras and touring artists to the Delta. The city merged with its neighbour in 2006 to form Helena-West Helena, the canonical municipal name for the registry. Poor in most statistics, Helena is rich where this archive counts: in music per capita.