{Click here to read some background on Lewis W. Jones’s List of Records on Machines in Clarksdale Amusement Places.}
To kick off this series, I’ve assembled a playlist based on Lewis Jones’s list of records on the jukebox at Messenger’s Café and Pool Room. Today, Messenger’s is more or less in the same spot it was in 1941, at 133 Fourth Street, which has since been renamed Martin Luther King Boulevard. Now managed by George Messenger, the venue is the oldest continually-operating business in Clarksdale, and is also the oldest African American-owned business in the city!
Messenger’s today
And here is the playlist of the music Jones heard at Messenger’s:
You can also open this playlist using this link, and you can download a pdf of the jukebox list here.
Edit: Tragically, George Messenger’s wife, Myrtle Messenger, was killed earlier this year. I’m sure that many blues fans, both locally and further afield, will be thinking of the Messenger family at this difficult time.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
allthirteenkeys 