What exactly is a juke joint?
From an essay by my wife, Dana Lise Shavin: The history and social significance of the juke joints are intertwined with the history of the blues movement that grew out of the oppression of blacks in the early 1900’s. The original jukes (or “jooks,” as they were sometimes spelled) were sharecroppers’ shacks turned nightclubs on the weekends. It was there that black men and women were free to gather, drink, and dance, and to hear local entertainers who traveled from plantation to plantation bringing their own personal style of music with them. That music was the personal, repetitive, soulful story of hardship, inequity, and sorrow. It was the social climate of the Delta that provided the early fertile ground for the movement to put down roots. With the Great Migration, in particular following World Wars I and II, the blues began losing its stronghold in the South even while gaining a new and unprecedented one in the North. The result was the demise of the southern juke joint in its pures
