![]() ![]() ![]() I went to every gig by every artist I could in Pine Bluff and the surrounding area. I took Boyd Gilmore’s advice when he said, “You gotta git, boy,” and made it my religion. But no one could deny the smokin’ energy of “Rocket.” It was literally a fresh feeling when I played that song from the stage. It made you horny in a way that wasn’t all sexual. The distorted guitar and sexual innuendo dripping from “Rocket 88” was too much for young Black and white kids to take. Just like ten years before when the snap and pop of the jump blues sound swept young folks off their feet. “Rocket 88” just turned the world upside down. Hell, the big pop hits of 1951 were songs like “The Tennessee Waltz” by Patti Page, “Too Young” by Nat Cole, and “If” by Perry Como. But in terms of what they then called pop or popular music, that boogie-woogie sound was the opposite of the very calm and stuffy hit parade tunes. R&B was very boogie-woogie influenced early on. Most people say “Rocket 88” is the first rock ’n’ roll record, but as Ike Turner told me repeatedly for over forty years, “Bobbyrush, everybody knows that that’s a damn R&B record.” It was his band and, although not credited, he wrote the song. But for all intents and purposes, this was an Ike Turner record. And that was “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats. And with a few of my own ditties thrown in, I had a pretty bouncin’ set.īut this was late 1951, and there was one song that came out earlier in the year that I had to play in my set. Louis Jordan’s “Saturday Night Fish Fry” and “Caledonia,” Johnny Otis’s “Double Crossing Blues” and “Cupid’s Boogie.” I blazed through Charles Brown’s classic “Trouble Blues” and Memphis Slim’s “Messin’ Around.” Those were great party songs. And I played enough of the hits of the day to keep the party going. Even though I was playing 90 percent of every song I knew in the same key, with a hard-finger-playing bassist and a drummer who could really snap, we grooved. In my first gig at Nappy’s I was just that teenager with personality that could get the house goin’. I sold my chitlins and my hamburger for 50 cents and ate my hot dog. There were three of us, each paid 75 cents along with a plate of chitlins, a hot dog, and a hamburger. Just a frame dwelling with a front door and a back door. And like most juke joints, it didn’t look like anything from the outside. Just a drummer, upright bass player, and me. Nappy’s was the first place I performed with a band, a microphone, and an amplifier. But it doesn’t mean that jukes couldn’t get rowdy, especially on the weekends after payday.īut I would make a name for myself at Nappy’s and at a jumping spot in Altheimer, Arkansas, called the Busy Bee Cafe. The sights and sounds, the tastes and smells, were ours and ours alone. Being in the thick of ourselves with our own groove. But in juke joints we fixed onto being segregated. Some people were fully liquored up, and some just a little tipsy. Men picked up women and women picked up men. With delicious music, there was a feelin’ in the air of livin’ it up. Still, music being the central attraction for most, we Black folks raised Cain to get into the juke joints. ’Cause the four Bs-the blues, booze, broads, and booty (money, not boo-tay)-were the magical mixture of people spending their paychecks, and that was the lifeblood of the juke joint hustle. This was so the bootlegging and gambling and-sometimes-prostitution could take place freely. Many were in the woods, off the beaten path. Most of the jukes in Pine Bluff couldn’t hold more than a hundred people. In the early ’50s some juke joints had improved in the way they looked, while others looked like they hadn’t been touched since Negroes built them. There was Sturdik’s, the Elks Lodge, Drum’s, Nappy’s, the Jack Rabbit, and Jitterbug, where I got to first know Elmo James. For Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had lots of juke joints. The good Lord had planted me in the right place. Photo Bryan Thompson, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Bobby Rush performs at Chicago Blues Festival, 2010.
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