Jook Joint, The

By: Graeme Boone, James Sellman

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Jook Joint, The

Place where African Americans gathered for music, dancing, and socializing.

The roots of the jook joint—a distinctly African American place for music, dancing, and socializing—reach back well before the Civil War (1861–1865) to the era of slavery. For slaves, free time and free space were transitory, rare, and surrounded in secrecy. In his autobiography, Tom Fletcher, an entertainer born in the late nineteenth century, recalled stories of such gatherings that he had heard when he was a boy: “[T]he slaves couldn't just come right out and say they were going to have a party or even a religious gathering. … [They] would use some kind of a signal … and one of the main code songs was the spiritual ‘Steal Away’. … The steal away gatherings sometimes were religious services. … Other times they were … good time parties.”

In such an environment, to steal away and dance, make music, or pray together meant more than simply to gather and socialize after a day's work. It meant to create a private space and a private time in a world of no privacy, a fleeting moment into which the slaves could pour their innermost thoughts and feelings. It meant to taste true freedom of expression, even in the midst of bondage.

After the Civil War life remained hard for African Americans. Slavery had ended, but most former slaves had no farmland or equipment, no employment, and, of course, no cash. They were obliged to become sharecroppers, which for many was little more than a new form of slavery. Near the end of the century things grew even worse with the passage of segregationist Jim Crow laws and a sharp increase in violence by whites (1,400 Lynchings between 1882 and 1892 alone). Yet African Americans also found ways to express their newfound, long-sought freedom. None were more important than the institutions that blossomed out of the “steal aways”: the churches from the secret prayer meetings, and the jook joints from the “good time parties.”

Like the slaves' secret parties, the jook joints were about a lot more than entertainment. They were a place apart. Commonly black-owned, they were usually located on the outskirts of Southern towns, along a country road or at a rural crossroads. In jook joints, African American life could take shape and develop with few white-imposed constraints, offering African Americans a glimpse of the full reality of their freedom and the opportunity to make that freedom distinctly black.

On the other hand, the term jook joint clearly reflects African Americans' dual heritage. The word joint has been used in American slang—white as well as black—since the late nineteenth century to describe an unpretentious establishment, principally for eating and drinking and often providing music for dancing. The word jook (also spelled juke) basically means to have fun dancing and socializing in clubs and similar places. Although jook appears in print only in the early twentieth century, its origins are much older. Jook derives from West African languages, for example, the Wolof dzug or the Bambara dzugu, words meaning “wicked” or “unsavory.” The expression jook joint, then, must have been coined in the African American community some time before 1900 to describe a simple place that for some people meant a good time and for others spelled trouble.

Jook Joint as a Crucible of Race and Culture

Of course, depending on time and place, the jooks and their more urban counterparts were not exclusively patronized by blacks. At one end of the spectrum, jazz trumpeter and vocalist Louis Armstrong recalled in a 1947 interview that there was no racial mixing whatsoever in the joints of his thoroughly black neighborhood in New Orleans: “In the Third Ward where I was raised—there were always a lot of Honky Tonks—gambling, prostitutes, pimps going on. … There were no whites up this way at all. They were all Colored.”

At the other end of the spectrum, pianist Jelly Roll Morton spoke of racial and social mixing of all kinds in another neighborhood of the same city. In Mister Jelly Roll, his biography of the famed jazz pianist, the music historian Alan Lomax quoted Morton's recollection of turn-of-the-century New Orleans: “So in the year of 1902 when I was about seventeen years old … [s]ome friends took me to The Frenchman's on the corner of Villere and Bienville, which was at that time the most famous night spot after everything was closed. It was only a back room, but it was where all the greatest pianists frequented after they got off work in the sporting houses. … The millionaires would come [there] to listen to their favorite pianists. There wasn't any discrimination of any kind. They all sat at different tables or anywhere they felt like sitting. They all mingled together just as they wished to and everyone was just like one happy family. … New Orleans was the stomping ground for all the greatest pianists in the country. We had Spanish, we had colored, we had white, we had Frenchmen, we had Americans, we had them from all parts of the world. …”Although dominated by African Americans, the jooks and their urban counterparts were nonetheless a kind of crucible, a dual crucible—not just a musical one, mixing together and forging new musical styles and techniques, but also a social one, mixing together people of different races and backgrounds.

Black Opposition to the Jook Joint

Although written records are sparse, it seems clear that by the turn of the century jook joints had been established throughout the rural South. Their dzugu quality, in the eyes of at least some African Americans, was manifest in the wild and unrestrained activities that went on there. Jook joints were often places of gambling, prostitution, knife fights, and hard drinking. Around the turn of the century, black prohibition leader J. C. Price complained: “One of the evils against which our people have had to contend is the crossroads grocery store, to be found all over the Southland. … Here with no city or town ordinance to … threaten certain punishment, they have been accustomed to congregate and drink their fill, carouse, engage in free fights, and do other hurtful and equally unlawful things. …”

Many conservative, reform-minded, and religious people—powerful voices in black communities—viewed jook joints with similar alarm. They were troubled not only by the drinking, fighting, and prostitution, but hardly less so by the dancing and music. Thus a 1923 editorial in the Broad Ax, a black Chicago newspaper, declared, “[I]t matters not what others think about it, dancing is some form of social degradation.” And jazz bass player Pops Foster recalled in his autobiography that “the Holiness church was the only one that didn't consider music sinful.”

To the guardians of religious and social propriety, the jook joint was certainly dzugu. But while the jook joint and the church might have seemed diametrically opposed, they were intimately bound together just as Spirituals and the Blues are. Indeed, these musical forms shared many features, including blues intonation, call and response, testifying, spontaneous polyphony, and other forms of musical, verbal, and physical expression. All of these traits reach back to their common roots in African American—and ultimately African—daily life, where the sacred and secular are closely intertwined. In any event, the opposition of social and religious conservatives did not deter jook joint patrons. For while jook joints were in some ways dangerous, they were also basic to enjoying life. They were not just places in which to be “free”; they were happening places.

Social and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century America

In the course of the twentieth century, the jook joint moved out of the South to become an institution of truly national importance. The jook moved because African Americans moved, in what was arguably the most important single movement of people in twentieth-century America, the Great Migration of blacks out of the South. In 1900, 75 percent of the African American population in America still lived in the rural South; by 1960 almost 75 percent lived in urban areas, mostly in the North. In Chicago alone, the black population increased by more than ten times in the forty years from 1910 to 1950. This migration gave rise to a new urban African American culture in which the jook joint, or elements of the jook joint, played a crucial role. For as blacks left the rural South they took the jook with them.

The new joints—black dance halls, after-hours clubs, speakeasies, blues bars, rib shacks, rent parties, and a dozen other varieties—might not be quite the same as the Southern jook joint itself. But they attracted the rural jook's city-bound clientele and matched its sense of freedom, earthiness and energy, as well as its role in providing for African American expression. During these years, the term jook itself came to be more widely known. Indeed, writer Zora Neale Hurston declared in 1934, “Musically speaking, the Jook is the most important place in America.”

At the same time, another revolution was under way, one that challenged blacks, despite overt discrimination, to play a major role in an emerging national culture. In the early twentieth century, American entertainment—both as kinds of leisure activities and as an industry—entered an era of profound and lasting change. These years saw the emergence of Broadway musicals, Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville, the radio broadcast industry, and the phonograph industry (including race records that catered specifically to black audiences). A powerhouse was in the making, and African Americans, the source for so much of American popular culture, stood at the center of it. Indeed, nowhere is African American creativity more obvious, nowhere more revolutionary than in music. And it is the jooks' role in the making of that music that epitomizes their importance.

Music and Musicians during the Heyday of the Jooks

It might seem ironic, even unbelievable, that the lowly jook joint was one of the major sources for the music of this revolution. But the jook joint was the anvil on which so much music was forged, by countless anonymous musicians, for innumerable local audiences that were as enthusiastic as they were demanding: Boogie-woogie, barrelhouse, Ragtime, stride, fast blues, slow blues, and Jazz, played in dances, shows, jams, and cutting contests all around the country. Black performers testify that black audiences were tougher to win over than white ones. “You can't fool a colored audience!” blues pianist Memphis Slim declared. “They're quite hard to please because all black Americans can sing the blues or play something and you've really got to be playing something hard or something different to move them.”

Norman Mason, trumpeter with blues singer Mamie Smith and others, remembered the force of their enthusiasm: “When we used to play around through Mississippi in those cotton sections of the country we had the people with us! They hadn't much outlet for enjoyment and they get together in these honky tonks and you should hear them. That's where they let out their suppressed desires, and the more suppressed the better the blues they put out it seems to me.”

Some performers became regionally or nationally famous, especially if they made recordings that became popular—the “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith, for example, or Blind Lemon Jefferson, or Aaron “T-Bone” Walker—while many others remained obscure.

Ray Charles, who began playing professionally as a sixteen-year-old, still recalls the Florida jook joints of his youth in the mid-1940s: “were small places with one door … [and] two or three windows. … In the corner they might have been frying fish and selling beer and soda. … The people were out there … dancing, and the band was stuck back in the corner. … [S]o if any trouble broke out, we would make sure there was a window to climb out.”

Similarly, in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston vividly evoked the energy of nights in rural Southern jook joints: “After dark, the jooks. Songs are born out of feelings with an old beat-up piano or a guitar for a mid-wife. … Full drummy bass from the piano with weepy, intricate right hand stuff. … And the night, the pay night rocks on with music and gambling and laughter and dancing and fights.”

We are lucky to have recordings by so many performers from this era, not only those, like Ray Charles, who went on to stardom, but also many lesser-known figures with evocative names such as Speckled Red, Scrapper Blackwell, Kokomo Arnold, Peg Leg Howell, Memphis Minnie, and Peetie Wheatstraw. But thousands of other piano ticklers, guitar pickers, harp blowers, horn players, shouters, and wailers are now unknown. They, too, are worth thinking about—the many journeyman musicians who played gigs, night after night, feeling the pulse of the people and translating it into sound, responding to and encouraging the dancers and lovers, the gamblers, drinkers, and thieves, and above all the working people who came, week after week, to cut loose.

Legacy of the Jook Joint in American Popular Culture

After World War II (1939–1945), blues and its close relative Rhythm and Blues (R&B), both influenced by the cities, but still close to their simple jook and honky tonk roots, grew stronger than ever, drawing on everything from the meanest lowdown boogie to the hottest, smoothest swing, and above all on dance rhythms. Old musical centers gained new prominence with new styles, particularly such Mississippi River towns as New Orleans and Memphis and the port town of Chicago.

Muddy Waters, one of the greatest of the urban bluesmen, epitomizes the passage of African American music from its rural roots, through the jook joints and regional recording industries, to the big city of the 1950s. Waters recalled the unfolding of his musical career, beginning in Clarksdale, Mississippi: “We played all the different things around. … It was a cotton farming area and, working out on a farm, why, you don't have too many ‘cabaret nights.’ Saturday night is your big night. … I went to church every Sunday. As far as music, you get a heck of a sound from the church, I think. I think the best blues singers there are today, even to myself, they came from the church … After my records broke … [w]e were playing for what we call juke houses, little Saturday night things, dances and so forth. … I always thought of myself as a musician. … I felt it in me. You just make things up when you're working out on the plantation. You get lonesome and tired and hot and you start to sing you something. … I remember that a lot of the records I have made, I first made those songs up during my work days out on the farm. A little later I moved to Chicago. I was thinking to myself that I could do better in a big city. … I could make more money and then, I would have more opportunities to get into the big record field. … I worked on the West Side in a few taverns, and I played house parties, too.”

Muddy's generation of musicians, who came up in the jooks during the 1930s and 1940s, provided much of the basis for the rock and roll revolution that reshaped the face of American popular culture.

Not only did the white rock and roll idols of the 1950s, such as Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley, owe a great debt to their black predecessors and contemporaries, but so did the British invasion of the next decade. Rough, guitar-based music that began in the jooks and other joints provided a basis for 1960s hard rock which, in turn, inspired the garage rock and heavy metal movements of the 1960s and 1970s—progenitors of the punk, thrash, and metal bands of the 1980s and 1990s. In black communities, the Soul sounds of Memphis, Chicago, and Detroit drew upon the blues singing tradition of the jook joints, as James Brown's Funk did the dance rhythms. Booker T. and the MG's, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, The Temptations, and countless others who recorded for Stax, Chess, Atlantic, and Motown helped carry on the musical legacy of the jook joints.

Rap and the Continuing Legacy of the Jook Joint

It is worth noting that Rap music—the most important popular music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century—represents, in some respects, a return to or reinvigoration of the values of the jook joint. Rap discourse itself, a descendant of black verbal arts such as rapping, The Dozens, signifying, toasting, testifying, and preaching, ultimately descends from African styles of rhythmicized song and speech in which moral, political, and historical themes are traditionally given voice. In African America, such arts have played an important part in social interaction, especially in public environments such as the jooks, where words define you and can quickly change the course of an evening or a life. The personal expressive focus of rap is also close to that of the blues, and of religious speech.

The strong element of protest and defiance in rap, sometimes verging on (or embracing) the destructive, suggests a link between the dzugu defiance of the jook joint and the life-affirming defiance of the slaves' “steal aways.” And the stripped-down rhythms behind the voices, often without other musical sounds, recall ancient techniques of African drumming and, during slavery, the practice of “patting juba”—a way of building rhythms by clapping hands and patting other parts of the body, including the chest, shoulders, or legs—as transmitted through the powerful rhythms of dance blues, Gospel, jump bands, R&B, and Funk that have driven so many dancers in jooks and other joints over the years.

Conclusion

As a crucible and conduit for black expression in America, jook joints and their descendants are more important than any social institution aside from the church. And above all, the musical pulse and lifeblood of the jooks has been the blues. As a young Chicago bluesman declared in 1977, “Blues is the foundation of it all. More than the foundation. Because you can come and tear the building down, but you can't destroy the ground it's built on.” Yet the jook joint itself is more than just a building. It is a people and a spirit and a way of life. First created as a place apart, it ultimately moved to the center, into the eye of the hurricane that is American popular culture.

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