Inside Poor Monkey's

• Main Author: Luther Brown
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Emory Center for Digital Scholarship 2006-06-01
• Series: Southern Spaces
• Subjects: African American Studies; Music; Rural Studies
• Online Access: https://southernspaces.org/node/42657

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.