Cradle of the Blues
By Donna St. George
Philadelphia Inquirer March 23, 1991
The Big Star is a tin-patched roadhouse at the edge of a
bean field, a wood-frame one-room juke joint where beer is served in quarts and
tissue-paper flowers fill vases on rickety tables. On weekends in the
Mississippi Delta, the Big Star beckons across miles of flat farmland.
It’s late on a Friday, the night is cold and the Wesley
Jefferson Band is burning up the place. Thirty people are crowded on the dance
floor, shoulder to chest to back, shaking and bobbing and swaying. The room is
loud and alive. The plywood floor feels ready to collapse.
This is where life's hard edges are eased for an evening in
America's poorest countryside. Even if a crop is killed or a town is crumbling,
even if people are unemployed and dirt poor, juke joints keep going in the Mississippi Delta. They falter
and fold, open and reopen.
Juke joints carry on today much as they have since just
after the Civil War, when they were established as a black alternative to white
roadhouses. In them, people drank moonshine, rolled dice, danced to music. They
were one of the few places a blues artist could play and one of few public
places where blacks were treated with dignity in the segregated South.
Juke joints remain a gathering place within small isolated
communities, a world maybe 50 people share regularly: more crowded when crops are
ripe, more desolate when land is fallow. They are the black equivalent 'of the
white honky-took. They are the secular equivalent of the store-front church.
And in the birthplace of the blues, they are its cradle.
Even as times change — and some shun juke joints for more
sophisticated clubs in bigger towns, where they can hear more rap music and
disco — new generations in the Delta continue to find solace in its road-houses
of old.
For some, confined by money or miles, that's because there's
no choice.
For others, like Jimmy Holmes, it’s because the connection
goes deep. ‘
Holmes is a college-educated, second-generation juke-joint
owner who for six years taught community-college sociology and biology classes.
The Blue Front Cafe in Bentonia, 25 miles northwest of Jackson, has been owned
by his family since he was born, in 1947. It is a cinderblock roadhouse,
painted Olympic blue, with two windows, a bare concrete Moor, a stained pool
table, two arcade games and six Formica tables-for-two. Bags of chips and
cookies are neatly stacked on shelves behind the bar, near big jars of pigs'
feet and pickles.
It's late on a Saturday night as Holmes, in a suede jacket
and slacks, talks softly from his seat on a ripped black-vinyl bar stool.
Two men are leaning back in folding chairs beside a room
heater made out of a four-foot segment of oil pipeline. Blues are bellowing
from a 25 year-old Seeburg jukebox that is lit with 1960s neon moons. One woman
is dancing with her image in front of a horizontal mirror on the wall. Several
young people are lined up at the bar to hear rap music on a color television.
Judy Holmes, Jimmy's older brother, reminds everybody that
his favorite song is No. 115: "Hattie Mae" by Artie "Blues
Boy" White. His smile widens when someone pops a quarter in the jukebox
and punches his number. Jimmy Holmes says whenever rap music is placed in his
jukebox, he makes sure it's replaced by blues.
This is a quiet evening. It's rainy and cold. The place
really jumps when the blues are live. Most of the time, that means the
performers are Jack Owns, an 85-year-old guitar player, and Bud Spires, 59, a
blind harmonica player. They are inseparable old-time bluesmen — as hard to
come by on some nights as a good-paying job.
"When they play, you can't hardly get in,"
enthuses Robert Hicks, 35, a millworker who stops in the Blue Front a couple of
times a week and counts himself as one of its best pool-shooters. Jimmy Holmes
grew up helping his parents run the road-house; he's operated it since 1970. He
may return to teaching in the fall, he says but he'll never leave his juke
joint. Now it's part of him.
Some of his customers are loyal regulars of the Blue Front;
others stop for a beer on their way out to a fancier club. When someone in town
is looking for somebody, they often stop to ask Jimmy Holmes.
"Ninety percent of the people come by some time during
the week," says Holmes, a thoughtful man of 43 who is known as
"Duck" to his customers.
"People bring in all kinds of problems," he says.
"It's almost like a family unit. In a juke joint, almost everyone knows
everyone or is related. You could fill up this place right now and there
wouldn't be two strangers."
It's a similar sense of belonging that keeps people coming
back to the White Rose Cafe in Tutwiler, Miss.
It is a rose-pink stucco roadhouse, marked by a neon Miller
sign, in a town that, like many others in the Delta, has been declining for many
years. Florence Seawood, 68, a lively woman of firm ideas, has owned the White
Rose for 28 years with her husband, Claude.
The Seawoods run an old-time juke joint, with two jukeboxes
full of blues. The bar looks like a lunch counter; the mint-green walls are
adorned with cardboard beer signs. Business is slower than it used to be,
Florence Seawood says. But her customers are loyal, she says as four
middle-aged friends laugh and talk at the table beside her, crunched beer cans
piled before them like a centerpiece.
Suddenly inspired, one of them, Bill Goss, 45, takes
Seawood's hand.
Under yellow, blue and red crepe-paper streamers, across the
linoleum floor, Goss and Seawood twist and sway to Clarence Carter's
"Dance to the Blues." By the time the song is over, six other people
have joined them.
"She's the one that taught me how to dance," Goss
gushes as everyone in the White Rose applauds. "I've been coming here for
five years, and I feel like I'm at home."
Delta life has long found expression in its juke houses —
through music and art and dance, through love and fighting.
It shows in the color and designs of juke joints, which
often include brightly painted reds, yellows and blues; some are adorned with
more intricate paintings of women or animals, as was portrayed by Birney Imes
in his recent book of photographs, Juke Joint.
Every now and then, expression comes in violence —ginger
that erupts in rock-throwing at one juke joint, a beating outside another.
From the early days, though, it was the music of juke joints
that most evidently expressed Delta life. Such legendary bluesmen as Robert
John-son, Charlie Patton and Muddy Waters played in Delta roadhouses, singing
about cotton and catfish, poverty and heartbreak. These days, down-home Delta
blues artists are fewer, and the old blues arc less popular among blacks.
But a good blues band still jams a juke joint.
At the Big Star in Merigold, where strings of Christmas
lights blink color onto the bare walls, people are applauding loudly.
The Wesley Jefferson Band is in high gear. People are
dancing fervent-ly, some from their chairs. Hands are waving through the air,
heads nodding. The bare wooden floor is shaking, heaving.
“Play the blues!” one woman screams.
The band veers into the lonesome swoon of "Sweet
Sixteen" by B.B. King.
The place is throbbing, but the quiet-mannered lead guitar
player is holding a blank gaze above the crowd.
He's in a fix: His wife, from whom he has been separated, has shown up
on the same evening as his new girlfriend. One woman is watching him, the other
watching her.
Roosevelt Buckner stands across the room, smiling. He's the
warm, robust factory worker who owns the juke joint and whom everybody calls
"Stool." Most weekend nights, he spins 45s on a record player behind
the bar.
"I don't make enough to pay my light bills," he
admits in a reflective moment, "but 1 like being here."
