Helena

The Phillips County Courthouse in Helena-West Helena, Arkansas was built in 1914. It was designed by architect Frank W. Gibb. The building was listed... on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.
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The Perry Street Historic District in Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, United States was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. It... includes the Helena Library and Museum and the William Nicholas Straub House, also NRHP-listed.
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Mary Lambert is an American film director. She has directed music videos, television episodes, and feature films, mainly in the horror genre.... Lambert was born in Helena, Arkansas, the daughter of Martha Kelly and Jordan Bennett Lambert III, a rice and cotton farmer. Her younger sister is Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. Lambert graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a B.F.A. Lambert directed Chris Isaak's first music video "Dancin'" and Janet Jackson's "Nasty" and "Control" music videos. She also directed videos for Annie Lennox, Mick Jagger, The Go-Go's, Whitney Houston, Alison Krauss, Live, Mötley Crüe, Queensryche, Sting, Debbie Harry, Tom Tom Club and others. She directed many of Madonna's early videos including "Borderline", "Like a Virgin", "Material Girl", "La Isla Bonita", and "Like a Prayer". In 1987 she released her debut feature, the stylish and controversial Siesta, starring Ellen Barkin and Jodie Foster. It was nominated for the IFP Spirit Award for best first feature. She is known to horror fans for directing the 1989 adaptation of Stephen King's novel Pet Sematary and its sequel, Pet Sematary II.
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Roberta Martin was an American gospel composer, singer, pianist, arranger and choral organizer, helped launch the careers of many other gospel... artists through her group, The Roberta Martin Singers. Born in Helena, Arkansas, Martin moved to Chicago with her family in 1917, where she studied piano. Although a high school teacher inspired her to dream of becoming a concert pianist, her future course was changed after accompanying the Young People's Choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church. She came into contact with Thomas A. Dorsey, known as the Father of Gospel Music, through her work as the pianist for the youth choir. With Dorsey's help, she and Theodore Frye organized the Martin-Frye Quartet, a youth group consisting of Eugene Smith, Norsalus McKissick, Robert Anderson, James Lawrence, Willie Webb and Romance Watson, in 1933. Martin renamed the group the Roberta Martin Singers in 1936 and added Bessie Folk, Myrtle Scott and Delois Barrett Campbell to the group in the 1940s. The group set the standard for the gospel choir and mixed group, and had an extremely successful recording career, featuring such hits as "Only A Look," and "Grace.
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Robert Lee McCollum was an American blues musician, who played and recorded under the pseudonyms Robert Lee McCoy and Robert Nighthawk. Born in... Helena, Arkansas, he left home at an early age to become a busking musician, and after a period wandering through southern Mississippi, settled for a time in Memphis, Tennessee where he played with local orchestras and musicians, such as the Memphis Jug Band. A particular influence during this period was Houston Stackhouse, from whom he learnt to play slide guitar, and with whom he appeared on the radio in Jackson, Mississippi. After further travels through Mississippi, he found it advisable to take his mother's name, and as Robert Lee McCoy moved to St. Louis, Missouri in the mid 1930s. Local musicians with whom he played included Henry Townsend, Big Joe Williams, and Sonny Boy Williamson. This led to two recording dates in 1937, the four musicians recording together at the Victor Records studio in Aurora, Illinois as well as recordings under his own name, including "Prowling Night-Hawk" , from which he was take his later pseudonym.
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CeDell Davis is an American blues guitarist and singer. Davis is most notable for his distinctive style of guitar playing. Davis plays guitar using... a table knife in his fretting hand in a manner similar to slide guitar, resulting in a welter of metal-stress harmonic transients and a singular tonal plasticity. He uses this style out of necessity. When he was 10, he suffered from severe polio which left him little control over his left hand and restricted use of his right. He had been playing guitar prior to his polio and decided to continue in spite of his handicap, and developed his knife method as the only way he could come up with of still playing guitar. Davis was born in Helena, Arkansas, United States, where his family worked on a local plantation. He enjoyed music from a young age, playing harmonica and guitar with his childhood friends. Once he sufficiently mastered his variation on slide guitar playing, Davis began playing in various nightclubs across the Mississippi Delta area. He played with Robert Nighthawk for a ten year period from 1953 to 1963. While playing in a club in 1957, a police raid caused the crowd to stampede over Davis.
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Robert Lockwood, Jr., also known as Robert Junior Lockwood, was an American Delta blues guitarist, who recorded for Chess Records among other... Chicago labels in the 1950s and 1960s. He is best known as a longtime collaborator with Sonny Boy Williamson II and for his work in the mid-1950s with Little Walter. Robert Lockwood was born in Turkey Scratch, a hamlet west of Helena, Arkansas. He started playing the organ in his father's church at the age of 8. The famous bluesman Robert Johnson lived with Lockwood's mother for 10 years off and on after his parents' divorce. Lockwood learned from Johnson not only how to play guitar, but timing and stage presence as well. Because of his personal and professional association with the music of Robert Johnson, he became known as "Robert Junior" Lockwood, a nickname by which he was known among fellow musicians for the rest of his life, although he later frequently professed his dislike for this appellation. By age 15, Lockwood was playing professionally at parties in the Helena area. He often played with his quasi-stepfather figure, Robert Johnson, also occasionally with Sonny Boy Williamson or Johnny Shines.
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Willie "Big Eyes" Smith was a Grammy Award-winning American electric blues vocalist, harmonica player, and multi-award winning drummer. He was best... known for several stints with the Muddy Waters band beginning in the early 1960s. Born in Helena, Arkansas, United States, Smith learned to play harmonica at age seventeen just after moving to Chicago, Illinois. Smith's influences included listening to 78s and to KFFA King Biscuit radio shows, some of which were broadcast from Helena's Miller Theater, where he saw guitar player Joe Willie Wilkins, and harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson II. On a Chicago visit in 1953 his mother took him to hear Muddy Waters at the Zanzibar club, where Henry Strong's harp playing inspired him to learn that instrument. In 1956, at the age of eighteen he formed a trio. He led the band on harp, Bobby Lee Burns played guitar, and Clifton James, who was the drummer. As "Little Willie" Smith he played in the Rocket Four, led by blues guitarist Arthur "Big Boy" Spires, and made recordings that were later reissued on the Delmark label.
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