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FINDING FLORIDA'S SOUL
By Madeleine Carr
Candidate for a master's degree in American and Florida Studies
Around the turn of the century, when African-American lumbermen, sawmill workers and turpentiners walked home along north Florida's rural, sandy roads, they'd stop to talk, to complain about the boss, to drink a beer or moonshine, relax around an open fire, and play a game of cards.
Those hangouts, called jooks, often began as open-air areas, and never offered much more than a roof and a dance floor.
But there was more than the building.
"These places have soul," said Tallahassee bluesman Charles Atkins.
My chance to study the jooks with soul came with the expansion of Florida State's Program in American Studies. In 1997, the program added a new focus, Florida Studies.
Lee Willis, a master's candidate like me, took on the subject of the elegant little Episcopal church in Apalachicola.
While he studied the sacred, I went after the profane.
Jooks were often the only rural entertainment. Additionally, they offered an opportunity to learn to play the banjo, guitar or piano. As a youngster, for instance, Ray Charles learned to play piano a couple of doors away from his own house in Greenville, Madison County, Florida, at Mr. Pittman's Place.
Yet both locations-the church and the jook-speak clearly to our collective aspirations, as all important symbols do. One required commitment; the other made life easier. One saved souls; the other provided an outlet for wickedness.
Yet there was, as Atkins noted, a soul in the jook.
Part of it was in the recycling.
Take the term jook. Apparently, it is recycled from an African word that's spelled "dzugu." Writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston claims it meant a bad and wicked place, a claim that is difficult to prove.
Or take the music. Following the African tradition, the only way to complain about the boss or life in general was to sing about it. The blues evolved in Mississippi jook joints, and by the 1930s was recycled back on 78 rpm records. Records were played on newly invented jukeboxes and danced to by a growing clientele, black as well as white.
The dance steps, along with the music, also had their roots in Africa. And without the recycled furniture, a jook just wouldn't be the place to kick back, relax, shoot pool, or meet women.
Or meet men. Or meet people of the other race. A major question I wanted to answer was how and whether Florida's cultural cross-fertilization may have affected a profoundly segregated society.
I was particularly attracted to the idea of investigating the jook joint as a locale from which a cultural hybrid may have emerged, maybe a mix of African- and European-American cultures.
The story cannot be told without the full cultural context of the turn-of-the-century northern industrial invasion.
In this region, the immense stands of virgin timber were cut by companies whose employees were 70 percent African American.
In contrast to elsewhere in the South, supervisory positions were not uncommon for blacks in the north Florida lumbering and turpentining industry.
But hundreds of jooks closed in the 1940s when the economic base changed. The last trees in north Florida were harvested, and turpentine products were replaced by petroleum.
Today, jooks are mostly associated with the playing of the blues, shooting pool and drinking beer. A mixed group of people dances and grinds to the music at Dave's CC Club in northern Leon County, or at lounges (as they prefer to be called) in Apalachicola, or at the newly reopened Columbo's in Midway.
The patina of age that renders many an old object rare and beautiful has been scrubbed clean at the remaining jooks. Somehow the seedy reputation endured though the seedy atmosphere has been sanitized.
A close approximation of what might be found in a traditional jook can be found at Waterworks near downtown Tallahassee. Here, musicians gather on weekday evenings to improvise, the old sofa is recycled and the music gets steamy. Most of the patrons are white.
But some people can tell you about the jooks out in the country, owned and patronized, for the most part, by blacks, with occasional white drop-ins.
Don Gavin, for example, recollects his grandmother's tales about jooks. He is one of the last African Americans to use a traditional work song format working the river cruises at Wakulla Springs State Park. He is also one of hundreds of descendants of the turpentining industry.
"We were really too poor to go anywhere, and we used to have to stay to our own small area," Gavin told me. A resident of Shadeville in Wakulla County, Gavin named a dozen places where people went to have a good time, getting there on sand roads that cut through the woods.
"They're all gone now," he said. "I used to go as a small kid in the afternoon to buy a soda pop or something, but mostly, they sold moonshine, had a pool table and a jukebox. Sometimes people would play the guitar."
At the turn of the century, when whites worked alongside blacks in the woods, they gathered at the same places to drink and commit other recreational sins.
By the late 1920s and 1930s, when the forests disappeared, whites opened their own jooks.
Along with this change came the jukebox, making its appearance in the early 1930s.
The atmosphere in a modern-day jook joint doesn't differ much from the jazz clubs in London or New York, except that jooks are rural and require a car or pickup that can handle a dirt road to get there.
But cultural fertilization at jooks was a one-way street. Whites who regularly go jookin' and think it's a "black thing" are illustrating a continued cultural misunderstanding.