Last Of The Country Juke Joints

elhawk
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Last Of The Country Juke Joints
Last Of The Country Juke Joints

Best viewed large for detail Poor Monkey Lounge aka Po Monkey's stands at the end of a long dirt road outside of Merigold, Mississippi, a small town located on Highway 61, the 'Blues Highway. It is situated right on the edge of a cotton field. You can see the plants behind the shack. They are the same ones I photographed in the shots a couple of uploads previous.

So what is a 'juke joint'? The name is believed to derive from an African dialect word 'joog' meaning disorderly. In the vernacular of the South 'juke' meant to play dance music or to act or dance wildly. The original juke joints began to spring up on or near the plantations of the American South probably in the late 19th or early 20th century as far as I can make out. They were a sort of night club usually in the form of a ramshackle shack where plantation workers and sharecroppers could let their hair down at the weekends - drinking moonshine whiskey known as 'white lightning', playing music, dancing, gambling and generally having fun, often of a quite raucous and raunchy nature. In the old days the music that would be played would be ragtime and later from say the 1920s onwards Blues became popular. In the juke joints this would have been a very loud, funky and danceable form of blues. From the 1950s/60s onwards plantations and farms became mechanised. Many of the black workers had already moved North to find work in the industrial towns of the North prior to this time. The rural workforce dwindled even more and the country jukes began to disappear, though many still exist in the small towns of the Mississippi Delta.

Poor Monkey is owned by William Seaberry himself a farm worker by day. Officially his juke opens only on Thursday nights. Unfortunately I was not in the vicinity on a Thursday, so I didn’t get to check out the vibe inside. However, a few days later I did visit a juke joint in Clarksdale Mississippi, known as Red’s Lounge and I will post pics from that in due course.

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Taken on: October 20, 2011
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