Bars, Blues, and Booze: Stories from the Drink House

By Emily D. Edwards

Bars, Blues, and Booze collects lively bar tales from the intersection of black and white musical cultures in the South. Many of these stories do not seem dignified, decent, or filled with uplifting euphoria, but they are real narratives of people who worked hard with their hands during the week to celebrate the weekend with music and mind-altering substances. These are stories of musicians who may not be famous celebrities but are men and women deeply occupied with their craft--professional musicians stuck with a day job. The collection also includes stories from fans and bar owners, people vital to shaping a local music scene. The stories explore the "crossroads," that intoxicated intersection of spirituality, race, and music that forms a rich, southern vernacular. In personal narratives, musicians and partygoers relate tales of narrow escape (almost getting busted by the law while transporting moonshine), of desperate poverty (rat-infested kitchens and repossessed cars), of magic (hiring a root doctor to make a charm), and loss (death or incarceration). Here are stories of defiant miscegenation, of forgetting race and going out to eat together after a jam, and then not being served. Assorted boasts of improbable hijinks give the "blue collar" musician a wild, gritty glamour and emphasize the riotous freedom of their fans, who sometimes risk the strong arm of southern liquor laws in order to chase the good times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Apr 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781496806406

Emily D. Edwards

Emily D. Edwards, Greensboro, North Carolina, is a professor of media studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is also an independent filmmaker, whose work includes the documentary Deadheads: An American Subculture, which is distributed nationally on PBS stations, and two feature films with blues music scores, Root Doctor and Bone Creek.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I was born in Florence, Alabama, four years before W. C. Handy (also a Florence native and the Father of the Blues) died. Live music was a featured entertainment of the Florence and Muscle Shoals area, and still is. When I lived in the Shoals, my musical experiences largely consisted of front-porch music, lawn music, and house-party music. In the late 1950s, the area added studio music, when Florence Alabama Music Enterprises (FAME) recording studios opened. When musicians Barry Beckett, Roger Hawkins, Jimmy Johnson, and David Hood of the Swampers created Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, the musical notoriety of the area continued to grow. There were no legal juke joints, drink houses, pour houses, or bars in Florence during Handy’s lifetime or while I lived there. As of this writing (2015), Lauderdale County still remains dry, although Florence became one of the two cities that turned wet in the 1980s, a few years after I moved away.

Even when Florence was dry, people still drank. And generally, wherever people were drinking, there was music.

Before Florence went wet, the drink houses were private homes and illegal bars. People willing to risk a drive over the state line to Tennessee to buy liquor and bring it back for resale or individuals willing to brew homemade liquor supplied the drink house or the house party. The more affluent country clubs found ways to skirt the law, serving liquor that belonged to the private reserves of members. Although country clubs could be targeted for an occasional raid, law enforcement was more likely to target the less affluent drink houses or (more frequently) to wait at the Alabama state line to pull over anyone suspected of having a trunk full of bootleg or moonshine.

The musicians who provided entertainment were often the customers, performing in improvisational jams. Rarely were they paid professionals. Music, illegal liquor, and drugs were the backbone of these parties, which might travel from one house to another to avoid the law. Though not fully integrated, anecdotal stories suggest there was more racial mixing in these illegal bars than in most areas of southern social life in the 1960s and 1970s. The mother who objected to her young daughter swimming in the same public pool with dirty black boys would be shocked to learn that her daughter danced with black teens and young adults at an illegal house party, where the crossroads (some might say cross-pollination; others might say corruption) of black and white music culture challenged the social stigmas of race mixing. In the mythologies of white, black, and blues culture, the crossroads is a place where journeys meet, where choices and opportunities wait. The crossroads is an important metaphor in blues music; it is an exciting but uneasy spot, imposing alternatives and the risks of choosing the flawed path.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, young white musicians, southern hippies who felt themselves proudly outside of mainstream American culture, appropriated the traditional African American blues sound. Rawboned blues music that portrayed the yearning, struggle, and personal loss of the black artists seemed to resonate with a white youth culture rebelling against the oppressive and segregated mores of their southern parents. I know how to sing the blues, a young white musician told me after having been busted for drug possession in Florence in the early 1970s. I may not be black, but the cops beat me, too. He added, And they made fun of my hair. With odd, convoluted logic, this young musician felt his love for blues music and his waist-length hair connected him to exploited black men (but not oppressed women). He believed his hair was a signal to the cops that—like a black man—he was someone to be hassled. Sensitive to the proximity of black America and its bitter, pissed-off readiness to mock beyond humiliation any white attempt to get truly down,¹ white musicians, particularly southern ones, seemed eager to prove their coolness in the music scene. This was not only defiance of the liquor laws but also included all manner of risk taking: social, legal, and artistic.

I spent all of my young adult life in the South: Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina, where I finally settled and became a professor of media studies at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro (UNCG). In the summer of 1989, Dr. Rebecca Adams and I decided to follow the Grateful Dead on tour as part of a study of musical subculture. I produced a documentary (Deadheads: An American Subculture, Films for the Humanities, 1990); Dr. Adams coedited a book (Deadhead Social Science: You Ain’t Gonna Learn What You Don’t Want to Know, Rutgers University Press, 2000). While videotaping Deadheads, I realized that the same music associated with the defiant drink house subculture in Florence and similar house parties in other communities was also in the core play list of the amateur musicians in Tent City (the nomadic community set up by Deadhead campers in the parking lots of the venues where the Grateful Dead performed). Unplugged parking-lot music included drink house staples such as Frankie and Johnny, Rising Sun Blues, and tunes covered by the Grateful Dead like Iko, Iko (a.k.a. Jock-A-Mo). Deadheads were largely a white subculture that championed the sound, soul, dreadlocks, and cool outsider status identified with black culture. Alternative and magical beliefs that flowed freely through Deadhead subculture were sympathetic to the hoodoo magic expressed in blues lyrics and the superstitions of the juke joint. Although the tailgate bars in Tent City were hardly drink houses, they shared a similar furtive quality and sometimes illegal entrepreneurship along with the drugs, alcohol, improvisational music, and outrageous stories about life on the road or at the concerts. I’ve always felt that the real key to this subculture—or any culture or subculture—can be found in its storytelling and the musical accompaniments to those stories.

I was a college student in the 1970s attending Florence State University (now the University of North Alabama). The university was a colorfully eccentric place to be in the ’70s. Hippies played the newly invented game of Frisbee golf on the campus lawns and offered impromptu music concerts in the student center. One of the English professors was rumored to have wrestled a bear and another professor entertained students with banjo music. The university’s mascot was Leo the Lion. In 1974, the university’s president, Dr. Robert M. Guillot, brought a live lion cub to live in a den next to the president’s home. It became natural for students who lived in apartments on Wood Avenue to hear Leo barking at night, just over the sounds of the music of whomever was throwing a party. Leaving campus at night, students found that most businesses were closed. The only place open to get anything to eat really late at night was the Pitt Grill, where you might enter just in time to see somebody famous, like Paul Simon, pay his bill at the register and leave without any public fuss. At the Pitt Grill you could sit down at two in the morning with some heavy philosophy over a cup of coffee brought to you by a waitress with the name of her current boyfriend tattooed on her arm above the crossed-out tattooed names of all her ex-boyfriends. It was a place frequented by students, musicians, hippies, and truck drivers alike. The Pitt Grill didn’t serve alcohol, but it was the major destination for sobering up between partying and work—or partying and school. Because it was located in downtown Florence, the Pitt Grill was occasionally the destination of someone coming back from a run to the Tennessee state line, a Pitt Grill stop before the final destination.

I was one of those college students who hated the drive to the bars in Tennessee. These places just over the state line looked like the large warehouses that sold cheap furniture. Big dirt and gravel parking lots surrounded metal and concrete buildings with nasty dumpsters on one side and nastier bathrooms on the other. The clientele was white and the music tended to be country or southern rock. The reliable events of a trip to a bar over the line were that the law would bust somebody for drunk driving or transporting alcohol or somebody would get busted in the lip because tempers in those bars often seemed inflamed.

The better time, in my view, could be found in temporary illegal bars or house parties in the Shoals area, sometimes on the west side, sometimes in the low-rent east side, most often for me in the student slums nearer campus, but sometimes at other house parties across the river in Muscle Shoals, Tuscumbia, or Sheffield. Though white people made up the majority of the events I attended, these parties were apt to be racially mixed. There was a happy rebellion thumping in the heart upon entering some ancient house with a sagging foundation to hear the one-four-five of an unplugged blues melody coming from the back room. Here we could flout all social taboos with positive relish. It would be a lie of omission not to mention the drugs. It wasn’t a far step from violating liquor laws to violating drug laws. Soldiers recently back from the Vietnam War brought legendary drugs to the party. The ’60s counterculture that urged people to welcome change by defying existing conventions, hierarchies, and drug laws was late arriving in the Shoals but it had arrived, even if relegated to a minority. Among some artists and musicians there was an added belief that drugs and alcohol freed the creative spirit and encouraged it to greater achievement. If not to defy the established social conventions, musicians were known to experiment for the sake of their craft or because they knew their musical heroes experimented with drugs. Either older musicians with day jobs or younger musicians with unrealistically big dreams played without contract, just for the opportunity to play and maybe get a free drink. After all, there were major studios right down the street or across the river. Someone important might show up. You never knew. It was possible.

Those important someones never showed. At least, I was never at a house party where Paul Simon or the Rolling Stones or Cher showed up, even when we knew they were in town, but other curious strangers did show.

I remember once meeting a raging drunkard named Bucky at a house party filled with college students, the art and music types. Bucky’s glamour was that he had served time in prison for killing a man. At least, that was what he said. He also claimed to have been a super bad guitar player until he broke his hand and the injury left him unable to play. Bucky was an older, scraggly man with brown teeth and a mean look in his eye. At some point in the evening, a bad cloud passed over Bucky and his mood turned ugly. He stood on a chair and announced to anyone listening that "the devil in me. Violence like a sickness in me. Sometime it make me so I just have to do something." At this point Bucky opened his knife to exhibit an unimpressive-looking blade, but Bucky’s sincerity was scary. After yelling and threatening for a long, uncomfortable moment, nothing happened. Someone brought Bucky another beer, the bad moment passed, and the music played on. That incident combined with the invincibility of my youth and the rebellious optimism of the time created in me a belief that the right combination of a cold beer and good music could break down racial barriers, open the doors of artistic possibility, and calm any savage beast.

Well, sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t.

In more recent years I’ve become an ardent fan of the Piedmont music scene. The musicians that are the staple of this arena are talented men and women who usually fly under the national radar, often performing for free at bars that host jams, at street parties, or for fund-raisers when a fellow musician gets in trouble and needs a financial bailout. Though the blues music scene has aged considerably and several of the core musicians have died, the improvisational music and outrageous stories still circulate. With the deaths of vital Piedmont musicians like Guitar Slim, Guitar Gabriel, Skeeter Brandon, and, most recently, Ray Burnett, along with ardent fans such as the flamboyant Naomi Alexander and Pat Freitag, I felt an urgency to document the stories before the old crossroads became a completely different kind of intersection. Many of these stories are not dignified or decent or filled with uplifting euphoria, but they are the real narratives of people who worked hard with their hands during the week just to celebrate the weekend with mood-altering music along with other mood-altering substances.

This book is a limited record of bar stories, particularly at the junction of black and white music cultures in the South. I wanted to preserve the stories of artists who may not be famous celebrities, but are men and women deeply occupied with their music, professional musicians with a day job. I also include stories from fans, bar owners, and family members, those people important to shaping a culture and helping to choose the direction it takes. My intention is not to rehash the history of blues as a genre or categorize the styles; other scholars have done this very thoroughly. My intention is to explore the crossroads, that intoxicated intersection of spirituality, race, and music culture that helped to shape a rich southern vernacular. The stories from the drink house are personal narratives: tales of narrow escape (almost getting busted by the law while transporting moonshine), of despairing poverty (rat-infested kitchens and repossessed cars), of magic (hiring a root doctor to make a charm that will compel a deceitful spouse to become faithful again), and loss (death or incarceration). They are stories about race (remembrances of a black musician whose mother did laundry for the Ku Klux Klan, of defiant miscegenation, of forgetting race and going out to eat together after the jam and not being served). They are the assorted boasts of improbable hijinks that give the blue-collar musician a wild, gritty glamour and emphasize the riotous freedom of fans, ditching the genteel bourgeois for the culturally kaleidoscopic and tribal experience of drink house music. The stories reveal what it means to be drunk, dumped, broke, beaten, and yet to survive with humor or grim determination. They provide the inspiration for lyrics and the poignancy of musical performances. Included with stories from musicians like Chick Willis, Roy Roberts, Big Ron Hunter, Melva Houston, Abe Reid, Mark Harrison, and others are stories from fans and bar owners. If you are looking for historical accuracy and meticulous fact, this is not the book for you. Storytellers often forget names and dates. What storytellers forget as far as historical accuracy still contains important emotional truths. The stories candidly demonstrate what we search for in our good times and how these good times bring us together, or perhaps pull us apart. If frank statements and coarse language offend you, be prepared. Storytellers in this collection do not mince words. Some might question why such imprecise and salty stories deserve attention. I am convinced we know ourselves better when we explore the stories that are the foundation of our heterogeneity, especially those stories that happen at the junctions of our ever-evolving culture.

CHAPTER 1

Buckets of Blood to the Better Clubs: Defining the Drink House

There are different opinions about what constitutes a drink house. Ideas range from a very narrowly defined blacks-only, illegal juke joint set in a private home to just any old place that sells alcohol for consumption on the premises. Some storytellers distinguished between legal and illegal operations, labeling the illegal operation a drink house, liquor house, pour house, party house, or after-hours club. Others did not make this distinction. Both legal and illegal bars seemed to operate in all manner of buildings: houses, garages, warehouses, sheds, and barns. Almost any type of building could be repur-posed as a bar. A surprise is that the ability to get a permit and legally sell alcohol did not discourage the illegal bars or make them less popular. Illegal drink houses continued to operate with gusto in the same cities that had legal bars. Storytellers suggest that working-class bars, both legal and illegal, were often the initiation for a musical career. As one storyteller declared, These places were ground zero for local musicians.

North Carolina was the first southern state to vote for prohibition in 1908, helping to encourage federal prohibition following more than ten years later with the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1919). After federal prohibition was repealed in 1933, North Carolina was among nineteen states to pass the Alcoholic Beverage Control bill (1937), allowing local communities to decide whether to permit liquor sales. The state of North Carolina maintained blue laws prohibiting legal sales of alcohol between two and seven in the morning, Monday through Saturday, and before noon on Sundays. Gradually, some communities across the state began to drop local prohibitions and authorize the sale of alcohol in retail establishments, but maintained statewide blue laws. As is true of most southern states, not all North Carolina communities ditched their bans on liquor sales.¹

North Carolina is widely celebrated on Internet sites ridiculing dumb laws as the only state with a statewide law that prohibits off-key singing, suggesting that North Carolinians do take music seriously. I have not been able to find a statewide law against off-key singing, but just as communities are allowed to set their own liquor laws, cities in North Carolina set noise ordinances. For example, Greensboro is a city that has ordinances on loitering as well as noise, but not specifically against off-key singing in bars or in any public location.² Rumored laws against off-key singing did not stop musicians from performing in North Carolina; neither did concerns for liquor laws stop bars (legal and illegal) from opening in the state.

From 1961 to 1980, Greensboro became an important gateway and safe stop for black musicians traveling the East Coast between Washington, DC, and Atlanta on the chitlin circuit.³ In upscale, black-owned clubs that echoed the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, patrons could listen and dance to the music of James Brown, Jerry Butler, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Charlie and Inez Fox. These entertainers could stay the night at the local Magnolia Hotel before traveling to the next gig. The El Rocco and the Carlotta dinner clubs in Greensboro were recognized for good cocktails, good food, and nationally known rhythm and blues entertainment.⁴ White-owned clubs like Green’s Supper Club offered similar food and entertainment combos.

Greensboro had a vibrant and legal bar scene, where lesser-known acts could play for a cut of the door, a salary, or tips. Sometimes storytellers did not differentiate between the ordinary, legally operating bar and the illegal drink house. Storytellers did not always know whether a bar was legal or not. Both places might allow roving musicians to come in without special invitation or prior arrangement and play for tips or a free drink. Both could have a kind of gritty charm and both could become notorious. The biggest difference is that with the illegal bar, the house man had not bothered with a permit for his alcohol sales or any other business permit. This deficit meant law enforcement could raid the bar at any time and shut it down. Even so, stories suggest that a fair number of drink houses operated for decades without too much interference from police.

Tim Duffy: The Working-Class Drink House

Before Tim Duffy and his wife Denise established the Music Maker Relief Foundation in 1994 to preserve southern musical traditions and provide assistance to artists, Tim was a folklore student whose studies eventually led him to the discovery of Winston-Salem drink houses.

"In the poorer communities and little neighborhoods, every block there’s a house where entrepreneurs open up their kitchen or their house to sell shots of liquor or beer. That’s how they make a side income. There are other people I know, who have retired, and that’s their full income. For twenty years, John Dee Holeman’s wife did that for a living, just ran a full-on drink house selling fish sandwiches and stuff. They’re like little restaurants that are under the radar. They’re very much a fabric of the community. I’m here in a little town in Hillsboro and you could see them all over. You can usually spot one if you see a lot of people hanging around all day. It usually means that this place is a neighborhood drink house.

"The people I know who ran them, Sam and Ezelle, were working-class guys. A lot of the guys that were their customers were the guys who drove the garbage trucks. They were city workers or postal workers, or just people in the community. Like anybody else that lived in a culture where they have bars, they’d just go into the drink house and shoot the breeze with everybody and have a beer or something. That’s the service the drink house provides. In the Deep South people know them as juke joints. A lot of people in the southeast call them liquor houses. There’s a guy named Captain Luke that’s a friend of mine, who just turned eighty-seven. He said he came up with the name ‘drink house’ in the ’50s when he came up from South Carolina. It could be true. Something has to come from somewhere. . . . I think it’s just a cool Americana term that people should know about. A juke joint in Mississippi is the same thing as what they would call a drink house or a liquor house here. Or even just a bar. . . .

"Sam and Ezelle were open twenty-four hours a day. They would sell shots of vodka, shots of beer . . . usually just vodka and beer. No drugs were involved. There would be always the cast of homeless characters that would be in and out, or their friends and family, like three or four guys that would always be there, and maybe the woman he was supporting, the old lady. Gabe [Guitar Gabriel] and I would go and play there. We would play the weekends or weeknights and Sam would actually pay us twenty dollars apiece and we’d make some tips. This still goes on and is very much a tradition. I met guys that made a living that way. For thirty years all they played professionally were drink houses. According to Sam and other people, there were some nicer places, more like real nightclubs, but they were all totally illegal. When I went—or still go—they were just in people’s homes.

"Ezelle’s and Sam’s drink houses were genuine working-class places where working-class men and women went after the job. Others would sit there all day. If a farmer would pull up and needed hands, people would jump in the truck and go work. What Sam Red⁵ was famous for was giving credit ’til the end of the month. Two weeks after the paycheck and you’re out of money, he would give you credit on your drinks. Even sometimes he’d lend you money—cash—if you had a bill to pay off. They were a mixture of social welfare agency, bar, and clubhouse. In these sections of town there were no legal bars, but there’s not a bar or tavern culture in North Carolina—period. In the northwest and other parts of the country, or in New England where alcohol is not a forbidden thing or looked down upon, they don’t have dry counties per se. Every neighborhood has a neighborhood bar where you can walk to and get a drink. In the Bible Belt, for various reasons probably going back to the early days of this country, the liquor laws are arcane and complex. There’s dry counties. . . . It doesn’t mean people don’t drink, both in white and black communities, poor to rich. Even the Baptist church after Sunday sermon . . . lawyers and judges are dealing moonshine in the back parking lot. This is just what happens.

"If you hang out with Captain Luke there’s always another great drink house. There’s always moonshine to sell. This is a moonshine state. Drink houses are the storefront for moonshine. They call moonshine ‘chicken’ in the Piedmont. That’s a code word to keep it from ‘the man.’ In parts of Alabama they call it ‘Joe Lewis,’ because it has a knockout punch. At the heart of it, these places are for selling moonshine. I don’t know the numbers, but there’s no shortage of moonshine in the state of North Carolina.

I fell in with these guys when I was a young man. That was twenty-five years ago. It was still going then, and twenty-five years later a lot of the guys have passed . . . but the drink houses are not gone. The one where I was just the other day, Miss Puddin’s . . . you just go in and you’ll go into the back kitchen. Miss Puddin’ sells food and makes dishes. The ones that I go to now are really more like retirement senior centers. A bunch of old guys and old women that spend time together. Sam Red . . . he lives in one of the senior-citizen housing high-rises now. He has an apartment and he’s still running a drink house to the old geezers.

Ralph R. Speas: The Bloody Drink House

Ralph R. Speas has been the archivist for the Piedmont Blues Preservation Society (PBPS) for more than twenty years and has been familiar with the music scene in the Piedmont of North Carolina since 1967, when he moved to Greensboro. Ralph described the diversity of bars, clubs, and drink houses that made up the Piedmont music scene, which included not only the illegal bars but also a bucket of blood, which was a type of drink house known to be so dangerous that when the owner mopped the place the next morning, the dirty water in the bucket might also be bloody. The bucket of blood was the most violent of the drink houses, where patrons often released pent-up frustration with brutality. In the book Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition, Adam Gussow devotes a chapter to Guns, Knives, and Buckets of Blood (pp. 195–232), where both men and women could be jealous, possessive, and murderous. According to Ralph, there was one popularly known bucket in East Greensboro’s past.

"I’ve driven by the old Bucket in East Greensboro many times. Now it’s long gone, of course. There’s some people today who will still call any bar or drink house a ‘bucket of blood’ if something rough happened there. . . . The phrase ‘bucket of blood’ is old pirate slang that means a rowdy place where almost anything goes and you could get ‘shanghaied,’ drugged, kidnapped, and awakened the next morning not only hung over but literally ‘lost at sea.’ Seaboard houses of prostitution sometimes paid madams to deliver prospective unwary deckhands.⁶ I believe ‘bucket of blood’ was also a term used in the old West for a saloon that had a reputation for being violent. The worst one in East Greensboro had an extremely bad reputation. Most weren’t so bad.

1.1. Ralph Speas, archivist and blues historian. Courtesy Emily Edwards.

"I came here to the Piedmont because I was recruited to teach at a black university because I’m white. A&T University⁷ needed a white face on the faculty to meet federal guidelines. And in ’67 that’s what I did; I came here to teach. I eventually married a black woman, Betty Jean,⁸ and got involved with the local music. Actually, there was mixed reaction to my going to listen to music as a white person in a black bar in the ’60s. But it didn’t take long—as the audience in the bar, 99 percent black—it didn’t take them long to size me up, to figure out who I was, what I was doing there, and that I wouldn’t cause any trouble. Then they went on about dancing and drinking and having a good time. I think the black drink houses were much more adaptive to me walking into their bar than white people would be to a black person walking into a white bar at that time. Once they got to know me, folks in the black drink houses were friendly. Sometimes there would be food, fried chicken or fish, and maybe there would be some gambling in the back. It’s important to know that not every drink house was a bucket of blood. It depends on who the clientele is. If there is more than one violent episode, however, a place gets a reputation.

"Interestingly enough, women operated most of those drink houses. They were controlled by women and fronted by a man, but the woman made the rules. Like the old song says, ‘Mama Don’t Allow No Easy Riders ’round Here.’ Well, ‘But what I care what she don’t allow, I’ll bring my easy rider in anyhow. But Mama don’t allow no easy riders in here.’⁹ And that was a very interesting aspect of the drink houses, the women were in the back. There was almost always a male bartender because he had to be a big, tough guy to act as a bouncer if there was any trouble, but women controlled the money.

"I think what we mean by a music scene is the general ambiance, the overall feeling you get from a place. Audiences absolutely contribute to that. A lot of times we put our emphasis on the musicians, but audiences are a critical part. They are a motivator for musicians and they determine what kind of place it is. Can’t have a drink house without the people who come there to buy the liquor and listen to the music. I try to put myself into the mind of someone starting up a new bar; they want a place where the audience feels at home. People want to let loose, so alcohol is important to everybody: musicians, bar owners, audiences, just everybody. The place where liquor is served minimizes inhibitions. It’s for this reason that most musicians prefer to perform where alcohol is served . . . because it does loosen audience inhibitions. You’ll hear a musician say to the crowd, ‘the more you drink, the better I sound.’ An audience will get up and dance and react more vocally, which the person who is booking and paying for that musician appreciates. Any substance that lessens inhibitions, the internal restriction not to do something because it’s dangerous, naughty, or wrong, is very hard to fight against. You want to let loose and it’s easier to do with alcohol. . . . Anytime the music is unrestrained and alcohol lets inhibitions loose, religious people are going to see the devil operating. However, the more restricted the thing that you desire becomes, the harder you try to get to it. A place that doesn’t have its alcohol permit might even have an extra fascination for some people. Smelly, shoddy, rough, and dangerous—all that gives the drink house a certain charm . . . or maybe the stamp of authenticity.

"You can get a thrill just by being there.

"Tommy Johnson,¹⁰ who preceded Robert Johnson, used to sing about drinking Sterno, which is not the kind of alcohol intended for drinking. Sterno is fuel you burn directly from the can, like for a camp stove. ‘Canned Heat Blues’ is about drinking Sterno, about doing what’s bad and dangerous. Many musicians invite this ‘bad boy’ reputation. People are so repressed in their everyday lives; they need release, even if it’s for just a few hours, even at the risk of flirting with the devil—or his stand-in, that bad boy musician. The musician, who is probably drinking himself, helps lead people in the audience to their own release."

Michael Bennett: The Campaign Liquor

Michael Bennett owns a guitar shop in Winston-Salem called the B String. He started playing guitar at fourteen, influenced by British rock and the Allman Brothers. Mike began doing guitar repairs as a kid and found his niche selling and repairing guitars as well as giving music lessons, but like many musicians, his earliest gigs were playing in the local bars. I interviewed Mike at his guitar shop in Winston-Salem in 2006.

"I played in drink houses or juke joints at an age where today it would be illegal for me to go in there—you were supposed to be eighteen to get in there.¹¹ The county I’m from, Burke County, was a licensed county. You could sell liquor but you had your blue laws, so you couldn’t sell beer or wine on Sundays but some places didn’t bother with a liquor license or observe the blue laws. We had a place in Burke County called Bear’s Head. That one juke joint—the Bear’s Head—would get raided all the time. Law would shut the place down and in a few weeks it’d be back open. It would open up or get really started at midnight and go on until the wee hours. There could be 150 people in there. The blue laws kept people going to those places, so they could party all night and all weekend. The place would get raided, the law would shut the place down, and in a few weeks it’d be open again with full bands, full bar, everything. If it was an election year, the place might get popped more often.

1.2. Michael Bennett. Courtesy Doug Mokaren.

"There was a funny sort of bond between the law and the juke joints. I remember one time these bottles of moonshine liquor were dropped