The Legends of the Rocking Dutchman - episode 65

Jook Joint

This transcript of the radio show is an approximation of what I said in the show. The real spoken parts may differ slightly.

And today I'll play a selection from a box of CDs that I got myself recently. Titled 'Jook Joint' it promised me blues stompers en unrefinded Rhythm & Blues and that's just what it was. The title of the album set of course is from the informal type of bars for rural African-Americans and through this episode of the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman I'll tell you some more about them. But first - music. This was on the legendary Sitting In With label from 1950. Here is one of these very forgotten men of Rhythm & Blues - Joe Papoose Fritz with the Lady Bear Boogie.

01 - Joe 'Papoose' Fritz - Lady Bear Boogie
02 - John Lee Hooker - I Tried Hard

Raw and uncompromised blues - John Lee Hooker with I Tried Hard and I found this on a CD set titled Jook Joint. Well I bought them as a package second hand, and several listings date them 2005 or 2006. And the title of this CD inspired me to tell you a few things about the social phenomenon called the juke joint, also known as a barrel house. The Wikipedia page on the Juke Joint tells us a definition of it - an informal establishment featuring music, dancing, gambling, and drinking, primarily operated by African American people in the southeastern United States.

The Jim Crow segregation laws - and the then current social structure - of the South prevented African Americans to visit white bars and so these places served the rural black workers. You could find these joints in ramshackle dwellings often on a crossroads, serving beer, moonshine, and sometimes providing cheap room and board or selling groceries.

The music was rural too - this was the place where the delta blues could be heard.

03 - Luther Stoneham - January 11 1949
04 - Little Milton Anderson - Mistreated Baby Blues

The Mistreated Baby Blues - you heard Little Milton Anderson and before that you got Luther Stoneham with a blues titled January 11 1949. Blues that likely were sung in juke joints that often featured live singers who earned a little money for the day. The stage, for as far as there was one, was often so small that a group of more than three didn't fit and most often it featured an old piano.

Around the 1900s a mishmash of styles were played by the musicians. At least, the music should be danceable. 19 Century musicians were fiddlers and banjo players. The blues were introduced to the juke joints in the mid-1910s. Much later, when the juke box came, or earlier the Victrola - a phonograph in a cabinet - and the owner of the joint could afford them, live music was replaced by records. The name of the juke box is derived from the juke joint, juke being a word for disorderly, taken from the Gullah language, the old Creole language of the slaves in coastal Carolina and Georgia.

05 - Lightnin' Hopkins - Shiny Moon
06 - Lazy Slim Jim - Wine Head Baby

Bluesman Lazy Slim Jim also known as Carolina Slim with the Wine Head Woman from 1950, and before that you got Lightnin' Hopkins with the Shiny Moon, and what a guitar work in that.

More stomping blues with Leroy Dallas that he recorded for the Sitting In With label together with Brownie McGee and Big Chief Ellis. A catchy and danceable blues, here is Jump Little Children.

07 - Leroy Dallas - Jump Little Children
08 - Alma 'The Lollipop Mama' Mondy - Streetwalkin' Daddy

Streetwalking daddy was that - you heard Alma 'The Lollipop Mama' Mondy.

The numerous juke joints that were to be found in the countryside of the deep south have all vanished, leaving just a few surviving on blues fanatics from all over the world comimg for their pilgrimage. There's an annual juke joint festival in Clarksdale, MS, and in a New York Times interview, the organizer of the festival admits that there may be some five of them still in operation, where the live blues are being played. So if you want to, you can still visit a few in Mississippi, like Po Monkey's in Clarksdale, and the Blue Front Cafe in Bentonia. More modern versions of the juke joint exist in the deep South, with DJ that play modern African-American music, but from a book I read that I'll tell you about later in this show, I learnt that the authors were strongly advised not to visit them for safety reasons.

09 - Joyce Jackson - Body Rockin Daddy
10 - Smokey Hogg - She's Always On My Mind

Smokey Hogg was that with She's Always On My Mind and before that Joyce Jackson's Body Rockin Daddy and both came from a CD set titled Jook Joint from Mainstream records. From the same set you'll get Lightnin' Slim with I Can't Be Successful and L.C. Williams with Baby Child.

11 - Lightnin' Slim - I Can't Be Successful
12 - L.C. Williams - Baby Child

(jingle)

13 - Earl Hooker - Sweet Angel
14 - Schoolboy Cleve - Strange Letter Blues

The Strange Letter Blues of harmonica player Schoolboy Cleve and this pretty much forgotten legend came from Baton Rouge, LA. He worked with the great names in the blues like Lightnin' Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy but it was not before 2006, two years from his death, that a compilation CD of him was released.

So let's settle for some more great harping stuff. Listen to Memphis based harpist Coy 'Hot Shot' Love with Harpin' on it.

15 - Coy Hot Shot Love - Harpin' On It
16 - Tommy Lee Thompson - Packin' Up My Blues
17 - Lil' Son Jackson - Groundhog Blues

I read a book, some time ago, written by a Dutch couple who'd gone for a bicycle tour from Memphis to New Orleans in search for the real origin of the delta blues, the field hollers, and they'd toured all historical places, the remaining original juke joints and music places in the cities and they never really found what they were looking for until their last day in New Orleans, when they walked in somewhere for a place to eat, and thought they heard the real blues. It was a spine-chilling experience, they wrote, and the reason I tell this just after this song, Lil' Son Jackson's Groundhog Blues, is that this song for some reason caught me with shooks down my spine. I won't blame you if this didn't do that for you, but for me, the essence of the blues was laid down in this song.

The bluesman in the book I read wasn't some old black man, it turned out to be young Irish boy. And this led the authors to the conclusion that the era of genuine blues, born out of the hardships of Southern African American field labourers in the after-slavery Jim Crow society, is gone, gone forever to be forgotten when the last of the bluesmen dies. All that's left is nostalgia to a time that was before the author was born, before I was born, and if you're not in your seventies or older, before you were born or there to witness it consciously.

I did a live radio show, together with a good friend of mine, on a Sunday afternoon for WSLR or Sarasota, FL, when the show host asked me if the forties and fifties were a better time than now. And they may have had better music, at least that's what I think, but for sure discrimination and segregation, poverty among the part of the population that brought us that great music, no, that didn't make it a better time. If you had a good job, money, well it was probably great but when you got enough money you can get along anytime.

With this kind of nostalgia I get a feeling like being a tourist in some third world country where everything is of a gorgeous, picturesque kind of poverty. We, as rich people, can indulge in it while for the people that live in it, there's no beauty to be found.

The few remaining juke joints where they still play the blues, are being frequented by tourists in rental cars rather than by impoverished cotton pickers washing their hardships away with a bottle of moonshine. With that, the places have become a museum, and the original spirit's gone. You can look to the past and learn from it, but you can't revive a spirit that's no longer there. The Legends of the Rocking Dutchman will continue play forties Rhythm & Blues for the sake of the great music not to be forgotten, but my program won't be able to recall the society attached to it. And if I could, I wouldn't want to.

18 - Manzie Harris - Long Long Time

And Manzie Harris ends this episode of the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman with his Long Long Time. And despite all the stuff I told you today I'm still surprised that I managed to squeeze in eighteen songs today. The CD set that I took the music from, is widely available through sellers like Amazon or the modern on-line music services and probably also at the local music shop.

Well I hope you enjoyed the combination of raw and uncompromised blues with the little lesson on the juke joints. Let me know and send me an e-mail at rockingdutchman@rocketmail.com or find me on the web, just do a google search for the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman and my site will show up first. Time's up for today so have a rocking day and I hope to see you again, here on the Legends of the Rocking Dutchman!