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LAST OF
THE MISSISSIPPI JUKES is Robert Mugge's exploration of Mississippi juke joints,
the rustic, often dilapidated music venues where, early in the last century,
itinerant blues musicians played for plantation workers and others,
creating a powerful new music which soon migrated to Memphis, St. Louis,
Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, and elsewhere. Of course, even as this
music spread around the world, changing as it went, it continued to
have a strong presence in the state where it was born, a fact clearly
shown by Mugge's 1991 film DEEP BLUES. And yet, in the decade after the
release of DEEP BLUES, artists who had appeared in that earlier film
began passing away, and the jukes where they and others had played
became increasingly scarce. So, Mugge decided to make a new film about what
was being lost.
Funded by Starz Entertainment Group and premiered at the Starz Denver
International Film Festival in November of 2002, LAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI
JUKES focused primarily on two well-known venues. One was the legendary
Subway Lounge in Jackson, Mississippi, and the other was Ground Zero
Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a new and more
commercial enterprise that drew on virtues of the more modest venues
that inspired it. The idea was not that these two music spots were,
themselves, the last remaining places where live blues could be heard in
Mississippi, but that they embodied important musical traditions which
were slipping away.
The Subway Lounge was created by singer Jimmy King and operated by him and
his wife Helen in the basement of Jackson Mississippi's historic Summers
Hotel. King arrived at the name "Subway," because the
entranceway to his basement performance space reminded him of the subway
stations he saw on trips to New York City. What makes the hotel itself
historic is that it was black-owned during an era of entrenched segregation,
and that, when it opened in 1944, it was the first in the region to
offer accommodations to African Americans. However, for music fans, its
bigger claim to fame was that, in 1966, owner W.J. Summers allowed
King to open the Subway Lounge in the hotel's basement, first as a jazz
club, and then as a place to hear down-home blues performed late into
the night.
By the time Mugge filmed there in the spring of 2002, the hotel had been
shuttered for years, and parts of the building had fully collapsed. But the
Subway itself was still open every Friday and Saturday night from
midnight till approximately 5:00am, with two bands, the House Rockers
and the King Edward Blues Band, taking turns as its house band every
second weekend. Joining these bands over the course of the night was a
diverse group of singers and musicians, some of them stopping by after
their paid gigs elsewhere had ended. Together, they played a rich
selection of blues standards, including plenty of "soul blues"
classics from Jackson-based Malaco Records. As a result, on any given
weekend, that dark and dusty room reverberated with joy.
For its part, Ground Zero was started by movie star Morgan Freeman and
Clarksdale attorney (now mayor) Bill Luckett, in cooperation with former
Blues Foundation executive director Howard Stovall. Together, they took
an empty Clarksdale building close by the Delta Blues Museum and
decorated it with the standard design elements of jukes - Christmas tree
lights, pool tables, catch-as-catch-can furniture, and an overall
makeshift sensibility - in order to endow it with the spirit of those
traditional, ramshackle performance spaces. Of course, while Ground
Zero's well-stocked bar, trendy menus, and sometimes well-heeled patrons
sound like the marks of a modern-day music club, their aspirations to
make this venue like
a juke offered valuable lessons as to what made those earlier venues so
distinctive.
At the
time the film was made, Ground Zero was not yet offering as much live
musical performance as it soon would. So, Mugge brought in Memphis
musician Alvin Youngblood Hart to perform for the evening, accompanied
by local musicians Sam Carr and Anthony Sherrod. Mugge and co-producer
David Hughes, a Mississippi-based musician and collector, also beefed up
the usual Subway Lounge talent with appearances by Vasti Jackson,
Bobby Rush, Eddie Cotton, Jesse Robinson, Lucille, Greg
"Fingers" Taylor, Casey Phillips, Virgil Brawley, and actor
and musician Chris Thomas King, all of whom had played the Subway in the
past but, at present, were too busy with their own touring to make more than
cursory appearances. Still, the Subway's regular talent (including
Patrice Moncell, Abdul Rasheed, Dennis Fountain, Pat Brown, Levon
Lindsey, and J.T. Watkins), audience members, and owners represented the
heart of the Subway experience, and that was true for the film as well.
LAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI JUKES includes the following narrative threads: an
illustrated introduction to Mississippi jukes, discussions of Ground
Zero Blues Club and the Subway Lounge, a history of the Summers Hotel
and the Civil Rights struggles that both preceded and accompanied it,
and a portrait of the public movement to save the Subway Lounge after
the building that housed it was condemned. Like most music
documentaries, this film alternates between musical performance and
related conversation, and interviewees of note include owners of both
venues, Subway patrons, singers and musicians, Jackson politicians, a
Jackson newspaper reporter, celebrated blues photographer Dick Waterman,
and Mississippi blues author Steve Cheseborough.
LAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI JUKES was first broadcast over the Black Starz
channel (later renamed Starz in Black) in 2003. In addition, a
commercial DVD and separate soundtrack CD were released the same year,
yet both disappeared in 2007 when the releasing label went out
of business. MVD's new Special Edition DVD includes not only the
original feature-length Documentary, but also the original Soundtrack
Album and a Video Update created by Robert Mugge in 2005 while he was
serving as Filmmaker in Residence for Mississippi Public Broadcasting.
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