Old time style juke joint...

Lovely NYT article on a surviving juke joint:

As Night Falls, Farmer Trades His Tractor for the Blues

MERIGOLD, Miss. — Thursday is known as “family night” at Po’ Monkey’s juke joint here, but that doesn’t mean you should bring your kids to this patched-up sharecropper shack that has swayed with rhythms and blues for nearly 50 years.

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The word “juke” is believed to be derived from the African-influenced Gullah dialect of the Southeast coast, in which “jook” means “disorderly” or “wicked.” In 1934, the folklorist Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “Jook is a word for a Negro pleasure house,” often a “bawdy house” where black workers “dance, drink and gamble.”

In the Delta of northwest Mississippi, an alluvial plain where cotton and sharecropping long ruled, juke joints were condemned by preachers as the houses of the devil, but they offered welcome relief from drudgery. Touring these clubs in the early 20th century, men like Charlie Patton, Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson pioneered the blues as an art form.

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Blues fans from Japan and Europe have also found their way down the unmarked gravel track off Highway 61, seeking an authentic juke joint experience as they tour Delta landmarks. But on the music front they may be disappointed. Although Mr. Seaberry said, “I love all music as long as it’s the blues,” the line drawn in his club is at hip-hop culture. Hand-lettered signs say “No Rap Music, Just Blues,” and ban baggy, falling-down pants.

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“No one really wants to hear the old blues any more,” Mr. Kemp, Po’ Monkey’s boyhood friend, said.

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