Million-Dollar Juke Joint: Commodifying Blues Culture

Abstract

Like a lot of thirty-something white folks, I had my first musical crush on rock and roll. After wearing out my Beatles and Stones records, along with my parents, I cranked up Cream and Hendrix until my cheapo record player nearly melted. In high school I began unearthing their rhythm and blues antecedents. Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, and the three Kings - Freddie, Albert, and B. B. - were rocking revelations. Brooding yet soothing, their music shook with the raw pains and joys I couldn't articulate on my own. If you can't dig the blues, you must have a hole in your soul, declared bluesman Jimmy Rodgers. Damn straight, said I. I thought again about the umbilical link I felt with blues after a visit to the extraordinary House of in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nestled in Harvard Square, America's capital of liberal intellectualism, House of strives to recreate the ambiance of a funky Southern juke joint, but at a cost of over a million dollars. More than just an unusually upscale blues bar, the club presents itself as a shrine to traditional African American culture. Its floorboards replicate those in Muddy Waters' boyhood Mississippi home; works of African American folk art line the walls; and plaster reliefs of blues greats gaze stoically from the ceilings. For all the artful rootsiness, however, House of Blues's business side is sleek and chic. A state-of-the-art system programs blues CDs while video monitors flash images of old-time album covers. Computerized cash registers silently total patrons' tabs for the international peasant food featured on the menu. A blues boutique offers low-rent gear like caps, baseball jackets ($230), sweatshirts, mugs, and lighters, at up-market prices. club's founder, Isaac Tigrett, plans to expand House of into a world-wide chain on the model of his previous venture, the Hard Rock Cafe. Houses of recently opened in New Orleans and Los Angeles. Branches in New York, Europe, and Asia are underway. This year Tigrett negotiated a deal with the Walt Disney Company to open clubs in its amusement parks in Orlando, Anaheim, and Tokyo. Turner Broadcasting will reportedly carry a House of television show, and Sony Signatures will merchandise House of apparel. logo on House of merchandise depicts the Brothers with their porkpie hats, sunglasses, thin black ties, and tough-customer expressions. In fact, the Brothers share a pedigree with House of Blues. During the 1970s Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, the actors who created the characters, built private clubs in New York and Chicago featuring blues. Later Aykroyd, and John's widow, Judy, helped bankroll the House of venture. In an interview with the Boston Globe, Aykroyd reported giving Tigrett permission to use the Brothers image after Tigrett got a flash that this could be a real good logo for representing this whole lifestyle (29). How did a pair of white actors in retro outfits come to represent the blues lifestyle? Why is a high-tech juke joint flourishing in Harvard Square? And from whence the mainstream infatuation, epitomized by House of Blues, with a formerly peripheral music, available chiefly on race records? In answering, I hope to show how commercial representations of blues culture exploit key cultural dilemmas posed by gender, race, and class identities. Consider for a moment the commercialization of blues culture over the past fifteen years. $30 million Brothers film (1980) and triple-platinum album were milestones. By the mid-1980s, barbecued ribs and chicken wings were perking up restaurant menus nationwide, while leather jackets and shades had become requisite accoutrements for a bumper crop of blues devotees and wannabes. Chicago began billing itself as The Home of the Blues as the music began to conjure major tourist revenue. Jump to George Bush's 1989 inaugural, featuring performances by rhythm-and-blues legends Albert Collins, Willie Dixon, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Percy Sledge, Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd, and Sam of Sam & Dave, among others. …