The Juke Joints - Masters of Rock Rollin´ Blues

Juke Joints were usually a one room shack on the outskirts of a southern plantation. During Prohibition, Juke Joints were the only places people could go and buy bootleg liquor. It was also a place to go to listen to music, dance and cut loose from the daily hardships of being a plantation migrant farm worker or sharecropper.
The term juke-joint was brought into the daily language in the South by the Afro-Americans. The words juke and jook, which are both corruptions of the ancient Elisabethan jouk, were according to reliable sources brought to America by the not quite voluntarily immigrated colored workers, that originated from the western part of Africa, and the word should mean 'to dance' or 'act wildly (disorderly)' in the evening after a long hard days work in the (cotton) fields. The Juke Joints became known as a place where they played ( what was referred to as) "The Devils Music". The so-called "Devils Music" became the foundation for Rock and Roll and thus Blues was born.
The small cafés and public houses, which were reserved for blacks only in the southern States, were usually named jukes or juke-joints. The cafés were from the very beginning normally located next to the cotton fields and owned by the white first or second generation immigrated citizen and owner of the fields. In few cases, however, the café could also be leased to a long-time loyal old labourer, who could no longer work as hard as before.
The good local colored musicians formed a basis for the classic blues in the joints.
There are, however, still old juke-joints in the poor, rural areas of the southern States, where the music is provided by real juke-boxes and not just by portable radios or stereos. A fantastic documentation of those jukes can be found in the pictures printed in the great book entitled "Juke Joint" by Birney Imes. The book was published in 1990 by the University Press of Mississippi. Another great source of documentation is also in this case the Junior's Juke Joint website edited by John Lee Doughty Jr..
The juke-joints represent an American cultural heritage that ought not be forgotten, and it is the hope of the editor of this site that more people in the southern States will preserve the story of the juke-joints, including the knowledge about closed locations, and the life that took place in and around the small, inexpensive establishments for eating, drinking, and dancing to the music of a juke-box.

The " Tin House" on our CD with the same name is an authentic juke joint, just a few miles outside Greenville Mississippi.