Luther Brown, Inside Poor Monkey's

Transformed in the 1950s from a sharecropper shack that was built probably in the 1920s, Poor Monkey's Lounge is the one of the last rural jook joints in the Mississippi Delta. There are several remaining urban jooks, and some modern reincarnations designed to reflect old time places, but virtually no rural jooks remain. These places were once common. Before the Great Migration to the North and the exodus to towns and cities, hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers and small farmers peopled the countryside in the days when one person and one mule worked ten acres. Today, on this depopulated countryside, one tractor works a thousand acres. The effects of TV, and the appeal of casinos, recorded music, iPods, and restaurants have also drawn customers away.

Poor Monkey's epitomizes the jook, the kind of place where the Blues was incubated until it gelled into a recognizable art form. As one local woman told me recently, when you go to a jook, you feel like everyone there is all one person, all sharing the same feelings.

Poor Monkey's sits in a cotton field in Bolivar County, west of the town of Merigold on the Hiter farm, land worked by members of the same family for generations. Monkey's is the only surviving sharecropper shanty on this land, although there are remains of a few others nearby. In the early 1950s, Willie Seaberry, known as Poor (Po') Monkey, began to operate the unused sharecropper house as a lounge.

(Enlarged Map: Poor Monkey's and Merigold)

The building is made of unpainted cypress planks, roofed with corrugated galvanized steel that is often referred to as a "tin." It is windowless, but has three doors. The front sports several faded, hand-painted signs. One describes the dress code by saying "not like this" next to a picture of a man with his cap on backwards, and "not like that" next to an image of a man with his underpants showing above his waist. Other signs tell patrons not to bring beer inside, "no loud music" (consistently spelled "lounld"), and "no dope smoking."