This documentary’s got just the right tone, sweaty and smoky and low-lit. Ain’t nothin’ slick about honky-tonk blues. Nothing arrogant or self-conscious or scripted, either—as you can tell from Red Paden’s bleep-word-word-bleep-word-bleep sentences. Kick back and let the music take you, as music producers Roger Stolle and Jeff Konkel meander along the Mississippi Delta looking for what’s left of the old juke joints.
Along the way, Big George Brock plays, and Hezekiah Early, and Terry “Harmonica” Bean, and Robert Lee “Lil’ Poochie” Watson, and you get the feeling you’d better listen close, because this music’s fading from the world. Today, people listen to hip-hop and rap, and they relax at casinos. Back in the day, they came from five counties to hear Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters play at Red’s Place, Paden’s juke joint in Clarksdale. Or to sit in the glow of year-round Christmas lights in Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, a windowless sharecropper’s shack that’s in the middle of a cotton field just west of Merigold.
Po’ Monkey’s has been open more than half a century. Now it’s down to Thursday nights only, because its music just doesn’t grab “all the young folk with their britches fallin’ off,” as owner Willie Seaberry puts it. (One of his signs reads, “This is a high class place. Act respectable.”)
At the Blue Front Café in Bentonia, bluesman and owner Jimmy “Duck” Holmes has learned the same lesson. He doesn’t much bother bringing in live music anymore—and when he does, it’s R&B, because the local black audience isn’t fond of the oldstyle blues he plays.
The producers, cinematographer Damien Blaylock, and St. Louis photographer and videographer Lou Bopp did We Juke Up in Here just right. If they’d done as good a job on a documentary about the drop in attendance at symphony halls or even the demise of the wedding-day polka, its end would break our hearts. But the characters in We Juke Up in Here have spent their lives with music that gathers up all the sadness and failure in the world and makes it one shared thing. You see a knowingness in their eyes, a mix of resignation and resolve. They learned it from the blues.
The We Juke Up in Here two-disc collection (DVD and soundtrack) is available at wejukeupinhere.com.
