Juke joint (or jook
joint) is the vernacular term
for an informal establishment featuring music, dancing, gambling,
and drinking, primarily operated by African American people in the southeastern
United
States
. The term "juke" is believed to derive from
the
Gullah word
joog,
meaning rowdy or disorderly. A juke joint may also be called a
"barrelhouse".
Classic juke joints found, for example, at rural crossroads,
catered to the rural work force that began to emerge after the
emancipation. Plantations workers and
sharecroppers needed a place to relax
and socialize following a hard week, particularly since they were
barred from most white establishments by
Jim Crow laws. Set up on the outskirts of
town, often in ramshackle buildings or private houses, juke joints
offered food, drink, dancing and gambling for weary workers. Owners
made extra money selling groceries or
moonshine to patrons, or providing cheap room and
board.
History
The origins of juke joints may be the community rooms that were
occasionally built on plantations to provide a place for blacks to
socialize during slavery. This practice spread to the work camps
such as sawmills, turpentine camps and lumber companies in the
early twentieth century, which built barrel-houses and chock-houses
to be used for drinking and gambling. Constructed simply like a
field hand's "
shotgun"-style dwelling,
these may have been the first juke joints. During the
prohibition in the United
States it became common to see squalid independent juke joints
at highway crossings and railroad stops. These were almost never
called "juke joint"; but rather were named such as the "Lone Star"
or "Colored Cafe". They were often open only on weekends. Juke
joints may represent the first "private space" for blacks. Paul
Oliver writes that juke joints were "the last retreat, the final
bastion for black people who want to get away from whites, and the
pressures of the day."
Jooks occurred on plantations, and classic juke joints found, for
example, at rural crossroads began to emerge after the
Emancipation Proclamation. Dancing
was done to so-called jigs and reels (terms routinely used for any
dance that struck respectable people as wild or unrestrained,
whether Irish or African), to music we now think of as "old-time"
or "hillbilly". Through the first years of the twentieth century,
the fiddle was by far the most popular instrument among both white
and black Southern musicians. The banjo, too, was popular before
guitars became widely available in the 1890s.
Juke joint
music began with the black folk rags ("ragtime stuff" and "folk
rags" are a catch-all term for older African American music) and
then the boogie woogie dance music of
the late 1880s or 1890s and became the blues, barrel house, and the
slow drag dance music of the rural south (moving to Chicago
's black
rent-party circuit in the Great Migration) often
"raucous and raunchy" good time secular music. Dance forms
evolved from ring dances to solo and couples dancing. Some blacks,
those seeking white approval, opposed the amorality of the raucous
"jook crowd".
Until the advent of the
Victrola, and
juke boxes, at least one musician was
required to provide music for dancing, but as many as three
musicians would play in jooks. In larger cities like New Orleans,
string trios or quartets were hired.
"So far as what was called blues, that didn't come till 'round
1917...What we had in my coming up days was music for dancing, and
it was of all different sorts" - Mance Lipscomb, Texas guitarist
and singer. Musicians of that time had a degree of versatility that
is now extremely rare, and styles were not yet codified and there
was a good deal of shading and overlap.
Paul Oliver, who tells of a visit to a juke joint outside of
Clarksdale some forty years ago and was the only white man there,
describes juke joints of the time as, "unappealing, decrepit,
crumbling shacks" that were often so small that only a few couples
could
Hully Gully. The outside yard was
filled with trash. Inside they are "dusty" and "squalid" with the
walls "stained to shoulder height".In 1934,
anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made the first formal
attempt to describe the juke joint and its cultural role, writing
that "the Negro jooks...are primitive rural counterparts of resort
night clubs, where turpentine workers take their evening relaxation
deep in the pine forests." Jukes figure prominently in her studies
of African American
folklore.
Early figures of blues, including
Robert Johnson,
Son House,
Charley
Patton, and countless others, traveled the juke joint circuit,
scraping out a living on tips and free meals. While musicians
played, patrons enjoyed dances with long heritages in some parts of
the African American community, such as the
Slow Drag.
Many of the early and historic juke joints have closed over the
past decades for a number of socio-economic reasons.
Po' Monkey's is one of the last remaining rural
jukes in the
Mississippi Delta.It
began as a renovated sharecropper's shack which was probably
originally built in the 1920s or so. Po' Monkey's features live
blues music and "Family Night" on Thursday nights. Still run by Po'
Monkey, the popular juke joint has been featured in national and
international articles about the Delta.
The Blue Front Cafe is a historic old juke joint
made of cinder blocks in Bentonia
, Mississippi
which played an important role in the development
of the blues in Mississippi. It was
still in operation as of 2006.
Smitty's Red Top Lounge in Clarksdale,
Mississippi
, is also still operating as of last
notice.
Urban juke joint
Peter Guralnick describes many Chicago juke joints
as corner bars that go by an address and have no name. The
musicians and singers perform unannounced and without microphones,
ending with little if any applause. Guralnick tells of a visit to a
specific juke joint, Florence's, in 1977. In stark contrast to the
streets outside, Florence's is dim, and smoke-filled with the music
more of an accompaniment to the "various
business" being
conducted than the focus of the patrons' attention. The "sheer funk
of all those closely-packed-together bodies, the shouts and
laughter" draws his attention. He describes the security measures
and buzzer at the door, there having been a shooting there a few
years ago. On this particular day
Magic
Slim was performing with his band, the Teardrops, on a
bandstand barely big enough to hold the band.
Katrina Hazzard-Gordon writes that "[t]he
honky-tonk was the first urban manifestation of
the jook, and the name itself later became synonymous with a style
of music. Related to the classic blues in tonal structure,
honky-tonk has a tempo that is slightly stepped up. It is
rhythmically suited for many African-American dances…", but cites
no reference.
Legacy
The
low-down allure of juke joints has inspired many large-scale
commercial establishments, including the House of Blues chain, the 308 Blues Club and
Cafe in Indianola,
Mississippi
and the Ground
Zero in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Traditional juke joints, however, are under
pressure from other forms of entertainment, including casinos. Many
get more business from
tourists in search
of an authentic blues experience than local patrons. The annual
Juke Joint Festival in
Clarksdale was founded in 2004 to foster appreciation for local
jukes and promote their preservation.
Jukes have been celebrated in photos and film.
Marion Post Wolcott's images of the
dilapidated buildings and the pulsing life they contained are among
the most famous documentary images of the era.
See also
Footnotes
- Jookin'. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon. Temple University Press. 1990.
page 80 ISBN 0-97722-613-X
- Jookin'. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon. Temple University Press. 1990.
page 80, 105 ISBN 0-97722-613-X
- Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the
Blues By Elijah Wald 2004 HarperCollins pages 43, 44 ISBN
0060524235
- Jookin'. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon. Temple University Press. 1990.
pages 82, 83. ISBN 0-97722-613-X
- Jookin'. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon. Temple University Press. 1990.
page. 87 ISBN 0-97722-613-X
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