Memphis Minnie - Black Rat Swing

When I went to Muscle Shoals Alabama in 1978 around Labor Day with Big Joe Williams and George Cummings there was another guy who came along with us. He was a German Blues critic,photographer, and record producer.. His name was Axel Kustner. He told me about Memphis Minnie. I had never heard of her. I knew I had a lot of learning to do about the history of blues in America. And it was not lost on me that it was a young German who told me about her. Turns out young people in Germany and France and Japan and all over Europe and the Far East know more about the history of American music than our own people do. Some Americans know the history of great American blues and jazz but most do not. That is a great shame. But with the help of YouTube I think everyone is learning about this great music now.
See the post below this one for Big Joe Williams version of this song.
The link below is to something by Birney Imes about Crawford and Axel Kustner.
http://www.cdispatch.com/opinions/article.asp?aid=10069
Click on the Label below on the name Birney Imes to see and read two more of my posts about him and his two photography books JUKE JOINTS and THE WHISPERING PINES.

Mississippi Juke Joints and Roadhouses

Juke Joint

Photographs by Birney Imes, introduction by Richard Ford

Reprint edition; first published in 1990

University Press of Mississippi (Hardcover, $55.00, ISBN: 0878054375; Paperback, $35.00, ISBN: 087805846X)

Publication date: December 2002

Description from the publisher:

A collection of photographs capturing the mysterious interiors of juke joints in the Mississippi Delta.

“I saw that photograph of the men standing around the pool table, and read that phrase, ‘2-kool 2-be 4-gotten,’ and the inspiration was obvious. Every time I sing that song I credit Birney Imes. Birney’s work is, in photography, what a good blues song is to me—gritty, edgy in all its parallels.” —Lucinda Williams

“Sweet lingering drifts through these pictures like heat.” —Richard Ford

“Imes immortalizes the juke joints of the Delta.” —Newsweek

“Birney Imes photographs what most people overlook.… Linger awhile.” —Douglas Balz, Chicago Tribune

These photographs by Birney Imes have the jagged edge of genuine blues music. They were taken in the Mississippi Delta during the 1980s, featured in exhibitions, and collected in Juke Joint, first published in 1990. After being unavailable for five years, this riveting book is in print again. As Lucinda Williams sang, it's “too cool to be forgotten.”

Imes focused his camera on nearly empty rooms, yet these bluesy, almost peopleless photographs capture black cafes, roadhouses, and taverns as a fascinating folk art that resounds with energy and pulses with the joys and griefs of the clientele.

The names of these juke joints are almost as evocative as Imes’s photographs—the Pink Pony in Darling, Mississippi, the People’s Choice Café in Leland, Monkey’s Place in Merigold, the Evening Star Lounge in Shaw, the Playboy Club in Louise, Juicy’s Place in Marcella, the Social Inn in Gunnison, and A. D.’s Place in Glendora.

To the volume Richard Ford, the acclaimed author of The Sportswriter, Rock Springs, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day, has contributed a long, perceptive essay that probes Imes’s photographs for their aesthetic values and for what they reveal beyond their surface.

Birney Imes is the photographer and author of Whispering Pines (University Press of Mississippi). His photographs have been exhibited in solo shows in the United States and in Europe. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Richard Ford, the author of many books of fiction, has been the recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
********************************************

In the movie THE FUGITIVE KIND Joanne Woodward explains to Marlon Brando what "jukin'" is. "You drive a little bit you drink a little bit and you dance a little bit. Then you drive a little bit more and drink a little bit more and dance a little bit more and drive on to the next jukejoint".
Jukejoints had jukeboxes but often they had live music. Bands playing either country or rock and roll or R&B for dancing. Fights were common. Bands often playing behind something to protect themselves from flying beer bottles.
Before the days of the interstate highways the back roads were often pitch black at night. Then you would see a glow off in the distance. Getting closer you would see a lit up neon beer sign on a long pole. It would say either Miller High Life or Schlitz or some other local beer. The parking lots were almost always gravel not paved. The cars would make a crunching sound on the gravel as they pulled into the parking lot. Then the heavy doors of the old cars of the 1940s and 1950s and 60s would open and close with a heavy kerthunk sound.
In the days of segregation there were juke joints and roadhouses for blacks and whites. They did not and could not go to the other people's places. But in very rural areas often you would find two separate clubs in one building. One club for whites in the front and another club for blacks in the rear but both in the same building. This was the case with The Whispering Pines in Crawford, Mississippi. See my post below about The Whispering Pines another fine photography book by Birney Imes and also the name of a good song by Big Joe Williams (often mistitled The Whistlin' Pines) about this old time Mississippi Roadhouse Cafe.

Click on the label Juke Joint in the labels box below to find my other post about The Fugitive Kind and a clip from the movie where Joanne Woodward explains in full what jukin' is.

Birney Imes Whispering Pines Big Joe Williams Song

Whispering Pines.
Photographs by Birney Imes. Foreword by Trudy Wilner Stack.
University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994. 96 pp., 12 duotone and 54 full color, 11x8".

Birney Imes, irresistibly drawn to Whispering Pines, began his photographic career there and has returned since the mid-1970s to explore its "bulging assembly of decaying backwoods Americana."--the publisher. Referring to the place as "overwhelming" and "irresistible" he recalls that the "The `Eppie Eats' sign out front, the rusting cars, the hedge in the parking lot dividing the White Side and the Black Side, and the stuff--it was everywhere inside and out: coin scales, pinball machines, jukeboxes, lawn mowers, old campaign posters, newspapers, guns, cigar boxes, and beer signs" lured him like a charm. As perhaps no one else can, he has perceived and expressed through these photographs the extraordinary in the ordinary.


The Whispering Pines is a song by Big Joe Williams. It is always wrongly titled Whistling Pines. I want to set this straight. There was a roadhouse cafe near Crawford, Mississippi named Whispering Pines. Birney Imes made a photography book about the place. He first saw it in 1975 in its declining years. He photographed it and the people who frequented it over a period of many years and eventually published his book WHISPERING PINES. It is still available from the University of Mississippi Press and also on online used book sites. It is a really fine photography book. He also did another photo book called JUKE JOINT that is just as good or better.
Big Joe Williams' song Whispering Pines is quoted at the back of the book in the afterword.
In the post below you will see that the people who put out that CD Big Joe Williams The Final Years also titled the song incorrectly. It is NOT Whistling Pines. It should be Whispering Pines.
I used to go in this place starting back in the 1950s. It was then just another Mississippi roadhouse cafe. A place where someone could stop on Hwy45 between Columbus and Macon and get a Coke or a beer or have something to eat. Lit up at night the neon signs beckoned in the total Mississippi darkness.
I also remember they used to serve a Malt Liquor called Bulldog named after the nearby Mississippi State University mascot. Miss. State is located in nearby Starkville, Miss.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s this place was a clean restaurant and cafe.There was a large neon sign out front that said Whispering Pines. Another small one said Eppies Eats. Eppie was the owner along with her husband. They had pinball machines and a good jukebox.
But if you can get a copy of Birney Imes book Whispering Pines you will see that after the owners' wife died the place really fell into decline by the time Imes first found it and began photographing it in 1975. And ending with the publication of his book in 1994.
The Whispering Pines no longer exists except in Birney Imes' book and Big Joe Williams song.