HERMITAGE, Tenn. (WTVF) — When a husband and wife opened their business, they set out to feed people, give them a place for great music and also give a little history. The history is even in their name.
If you look up the term 'juke joint', you're going to get a couple definitions and pictures. So, we headed over to Jefferson Street Sound Museum where Lorenzo Washington is always ready to teach.
"Juke joints started back during slavery," Lorenzo said. "They didn't have places for the slaves to go hang out and party, so they'd have this little cabin on the premises."
That evolved, and by the Jim Crow era, Black-owned juke joints offered music and good food all over communities including North Nashville.
"They would hold 30, 40 people maybe," Lorenzo said. "Some were a lot smaller. There were a couple of them here on Jefferson Street. The last one that I know of on Jefferson Street was down at Sir Pizza's. It was a pizza restaurant in the front, but in the back, they had a little juke joint."
In the years before the interstate arrived and changed North Nashville, Lorenzo remembers a little juke joint at the end of an alley on Cowan Street.
"I was 10, 11-years-old," he remembered. "It was just excitement all the time. We as kids would be peeping through the windows at the older folk in there partying in the juke joint. We weren't supposed to be nowhere close to the juke joint! Very good memories. When the interstate came through, most of those places left. The ones on Jefferson Street ended during the middle 60s."
So, was that the end of the juke joint in Nashville? Not exactly.
For the past eleven years, Gwatholyn and Michael Turney have been growing a place now on Nashville Shores Marina in Hermitage.
"You are standing in Papa Turney's BBQ also known as Miss Zeke's Juke Joint," Michael said.
The two of them have their view of what makes a juke joint today.
"Down home!" said Gwatholyn. "It's everybody welcome, everybody having fun."
"I grew up playing the guitar in gospel quartets and top 40 bands," Michael continued. "There were probably 30 different so-called juke joints up and around north Nashville in and around Jefferson Street. That's what we try to create here. When we talk about a juke joint, there's no other place in Nashville like what we do."
And what they do is groove — consider watching the player above to see the music move them.
On Friday night, that's what's brought out Lorenzo. For him, it was a chance to re-connect with a memory.
"Papa Turney's still has that atmosphere I used to see, peeping in the window where my granddaddy used to hang out at that juke joint on Cowan Street," Lorenzo said.
"There's a picture over the door of the kitchen that says, 'welcome family,'" said Michael. "It's the human family. Everybody. Whether you're big, skinny, tall, gay, straight, green, blue, when you walk through those doors, everybody is family. We are Nashville's only and last juke joint."
Fostering Hope provides Christmas for kids in foster care. I'm delighted to see Fostering Hope expand this year to expand their reach to now include kids in Foster care in metro AND foster kids in East TN hard hit by Helene.
-Bree Smith
