Juke Joints Research Articles

The Artificial Southerner: Equivocations and Love Songs

The Artificial Southerner: Equivocations and Love Songs. By Philip Martin. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001. Pp. vii, 206. Acknowledgments, introduction, afterword. $19.95, paper.) Distilling an overriding theme from a collection of essays that appeared initially as newspaper pieces is a suspect enterprise. Nevertheless, I will venture that Philip Martin's artificial as represented here, is self-aware, romantic, creole in background, catholic in taste, and unfailingly polite. Arkansans, on the other hand, differ from residents elsewhere in the Old Confederacy. In Martin's rendering, raw, insecure Snopeses represent the heritage of the Toothpick State, which was unleavened by a Deep South helping of aristocrats. Martin's assumptions about the humble character of early Arkansas fail to take into account the notable power and influence of antebellum plantation owners. Yet, as Martin would be the first to acknowledge, southern identity is constructed more from assumptions about the region's past than from actual history. He notes in his introduction to this volume that he chose to be a southerner, much as one opts to stick with a particular wardrobe, and from that decision other preferences and habits fit easily into place. Demands for authenticity are not simply a lost cause, but beside the point. Apparently, however, the self-made southerner remains unperturbed and easy in his skin if he forgets the circumstances of his creation and ever afterward believes himself haunted from birth by defeat, tragic knowledge, and a violent legacy. Martin understands that the unified field theory of southern culture imposes an order at odds with actual experience. But he prefers not to venture beyond boundaries drawn during the last century by C. Vann Woodward, W. J. Cash, and William Faulkner. The book is filled primarily with sketches of contemporary singers, musicians, and authors, often based on interviews Martin conducted as he covered the popular culture beat for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. They are stylishly written, generous in their appreciation for estimable careers, while understanding of the shortcomings we come to expect from the talented. Readers of his columns know of Martin's affection for guitar-driven rock bands, but here he pays attention to bluesmen and country crooners. Martin asserts persuasively that southern music both reflected the color line and grew from the cross-influences of black and white musicians. The Grand Ole Opry and the juke joints of Helena were not worlds apart but gathering places for a melange of styles originating in the ancestral homes of the first southern migrants. …

THE BLUES, THE FOLK, AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY

ON a stifling Saturday in Texas in June 1937 a twenty-six-year-old African-American musician, Robert Johnson, stepped to the microphone in a makeshift recording studio in a disused warehouse atop a Buick showroom. Johnson had grabbed a ride west from his native Mississippi to make it to the recording session in Dallas, one more journey in a life that had been spent by and large on the road. In contemporary parlance, he was a songster: an itinerant guitarist and maker of songs who scraped together a living wherever he found it, performing on street corners and in juke joints in the Deep South, sometimes drifting north, even reaching New York City, but always heading south again. That he recorded at all came down largely to luck; luck, and the exigencies of the Great Depression, which cut deeply into record company profits and forced the so-called ‘race record’ companies, which sold to an almost entirely black market, to look for cheap talent, Southern performers with local reputations who might appeal to regional markets. Johnson was one of many who caught a talent scout’s ear in the Mississippi Delta in the late 1930s. On that Saturday in Dallas he recorded fifteen songs, among them a haunted blues called ‘Hellhound on my Trail’.

Dancing our way out of class through funk, techno or rave

What do James Brown, Henri Bergson, Techno and Rave have in common? Rhythm, the body, intuition and freedom. I cannot quite imagine Henri Bergson moving his frail body to James Brown's beat, but his philosophy of elan vital addresses rhythm, the body, intuition and freedom in the constant awareness of movement which is at the core of his work. How do rhythm, dance and trance succeed in breaking down the barriers of identity, thus facilitating the elimination of social, cultural and gender boundaries? Funk and its children Techno and Rave give us a music that can be felt as much as heard, and whose percussive and repetitive nature recalls the frenetic drums of African tribal dances. Whether it is within the kitsch red leather confines of a juke joint, or the huge warehouses where Techno and Rave dance experiences happen, these dance floors have become a secular ritualistic locus of emancipation and liberation from society's ever growing stranglehold.

Play the blues, punk

Play the Blues, Punk Bill Freind R.L. Burnside, A Ass Pocket Full of Whiskey, Matador, 1996. Jon Spenser Blues Explosion, Now I Got Worry, Matador/Capitol, 1997. Unlike almost every other form of contemporary music, blues thrives on tradition. While old school hip-hop, for example, refers to a style just over a decade old, in blues the I-IV-V chord progression remains as pertinent today as it was in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s day. Inextricably tied up in that is the question of who “owns” the tradition. Primarily developed by African-Americans, the blues provided inspiration to two generations of white rock musicians, and in some cases, offered them a convenient supply of riffs (and occasionally, entire songs) to steal. But most rock musicians were after more than riffs. They were searching for what for lack of a better word we might call authenticity. In the 1960s, when the power of rock and roll was its newness, its oppositional stance, most bands still had a few blues covers in their repertoire, which allowed them to augment that oppositional stance with a claim to a much longer tradition. Band names are far from incidental, and it’s interesting to note how many bands turned to the blues as a way of suggesting a connection with that origin. The Rolling Stones picked their name from Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy,” Pink Floyd was assembled from the first names of two bluesmen, and the Jefferson Airplane got their title from a fictitious blues singer, Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane. Even the Lovin’ Spoonful, a band whose specialty was Top 40 pop, got their name from a line in Mississippi John Hurt’s “Coffee Blues.” So it’s not just critical fussing to note that for most of their career the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion avoided any connection with the blues, never covering a blues standard and shunning totally the staple riffs. That’s especially striking given the Blues Explosion’s approach to the rock, soul and R&B tradition: they’ve appropriated, alluded to, and parodied everyone from Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to Led Zeppelin, Public Enemy, and George Clinton. None of that stopped Spencer from asserting his prominence as a blues howler. Toward the end of “Flavor,” from the Blues Explosion’s 1994 album, Orange, Spencer introduces the band members, and when it comes time to introduce himself, he says “And the number one blues singer in the country...” Apparently seeing no need to give his name, Spencer instead offers his trademark shout of “Blues Explosion!” But suddenly Spencer adds, “Yeah, that’s right, we’re number one... Number one in Philadelphia, Number one in DC, Number one in Chicago...” and continues to rattle off the names of most cities in the country. What’s interesting is that Spencer is playing on Public Enemy’s “Public Enemy No. 1” from their debut album Yo! Bum Rush the Show, in which Flavor Flav comes in with “That’s right, we’re public enemy number one in New York, public enemy number one in DC...” But Spencer’s saying something entirely different from Flavor Flav, not sampling PE, not responding to them, maybe not even making a serious claim, since he follows it with a high pitched “Sooooouuuullll,” a reference to the opening of the old “Soul Train” shows. At that point, the beat abruptly slows and neo-folkie turned alternative hip-hop star Beck comes in with a rap recorded during a phone conversation with Spencer. Whatever you might say about that pastiche of sources, one thing is clear: it’s not blues. If the Blues Explosion hold a less than reverent attitude toward “the tradition” and have essentially ignored the blues, why did they team up with R.L. Burnside? If you believe the press releases, Burnside is one of the last remaining bluesmen with any claim to “authenticity.” Son of a Mississippi sharecropper, himself a former sharecropper and juke joint proprietor, he learned guitar from Muddy Waters, who married Burnside’s first cousin. He also played with Mississippi Fred MacDowell in the country supper circuit, and was nominated last year for two W.C. Handy awards, including “Best...

Following the Traces of Female Desire in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Toni Morrison's exploration of desire seeps into every aspect of her novel Jazz, from the richness of her style the content matter of her love triangle. She moves from clarinets on Harlem street corners which awaken desire in passers-by an eighteen-year-old girl with a pock-marked face awakening desire in a fifty-year-old married man. What becomes clear, however, is that Morrison is not simply telling the story of the conflicting sexual desires of Violet Trace, her husband Joe, and his eighteen-year-old lover Dorcas. Rather, she is theorizing the nature of desire, particularly African-American female desire, and its effect on narrative. In Jazz, Morrison broadens traditional approaches desire by considering factors of race and gender and by removing female desire from its rut of sexual embodiment. Specifically, Morrison suggests that sexual desire becomes the only desire operative when the fulfillment of other desires is denied and that what African-American women currently most desire, and what is currently most denied them, is subjectivity, the consciousness needed act as a subject. She then lays out a subject formation process needed fulfill this desire for subjectivity and suggests that this formation is instigated by the violent element in female desire and culminates in a process of female bonding based on recognizing other women as subjects.(1) Finally, through the setting of her story, Harlem in the 1920s, she brings out the significance of her vision of black female desire by contextualizing it within the African-American desire embodied in the Harlem Renaissance. Morrison begins her story with sexual desire because that is the only level of desire her character Violet initially understands. The narrator tells the plot of this desire quickly in the first two pages: Sth, I know that woman. She used live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went the funeral see the girl and cut her dead face they threw her the floor and out of the church.... There was never anyone prosecute [Joe Trace] because nobody actually saw him do it, and the dead girl's aunt didn't want throw money helpless lawyers or laughing cops when she knew the expense wouldn't improve anything. Besides, she found out that the man who killed her niece cried all day and for him and for Violet that is as bad as jail. (3-4) Driven by his sexual desire first seek out Dorcas and then kill her to keep the feeling going, Joe has created his own jail or personal hell; and driven by her sexual desire into the jealous rage that makes her slash the dead girl's face, Violet has also created her own jail. But Violet and Joe do not stay in their self-created jails because Violet learns of her desire for subjectivity, the desire that Morrison's book theorizes and bases on the theory of jazz. The Blueprint of Jazz In Jazz, Morrison highlights how contemporary black female desire has derived from the cultural context of an African-American heritage include an element of violence as it struggles, with the aid of female bonding, toward its object of subjectivity. And the music denoted by the title of her novel, jazz, becomes the blueprint for her theory of black female desire. She sees desire, like jazz, as both a creative and violent force, and, also like jazz, she sees desire creating solo voices within a community. Speaking of Alice Manfred, Dorcas's aunt, and her interpretation of jazz, the narrator tells us: It faked happiness, faked welcome, but it did not make her feel generous, this juke joint, barrel hooch, tonk house, music. …

Million-Dollar Juke Joint: Commodifying Blues Culture

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. …

Juke Joint Saturday Night

Juke Joint Saturday Night