Another definition of Juke (or Jook) Joint

Zora Neale Hurston’s essay, Characteristics of Negro Expression, published in 1934, was perhaps the first attempt, in the form of an official document*, to define the jook joint.
Hurston treated the jook as an indigenous Black cultural formation:

Jook is a term that indicates a pleasure house for Blacks. It can mean a pleasure house. It can also mean the secluded house that is set up during public works where men and women dance, drink, and gamble. Often, it is a combination of all these things. (89)

Similar to night clubs, jook joints acquired a particular flavor through their association with the labor camp culture in the South. The Florida State Guide of the Federal Writers’ Project connected Florida’s jook joints to the work of Blacks in the turpentine camps in the north of the state; “less well known are the Black ‘jooks,’ primitive rural equivalents of resort night clubs, where turpentine workers relax in the evening deep in the pine woods” (114).

It is no coincidence that jook joints are associated with labor camps; they arose as a necessary secular social counterpart to the reorganized labor system after emancipation. “They were often built like labor camps, turpentine camps, or sawmills, allowing the workers to let off steam after a hard day—or more often a week—of work” (Juke Joints and Jubilee 5). Some scholars have argued that jook joints reproduced the private leisure space of the plantation in the new social order (Hazzard-Gordon 77).

*The definition of jook contained in the Oxford English Dictionary cites her book Mules and Men, published in 1935, as the first mention of the word in literature.

• Juliet Gorman, May 2001 •

What is a Jook Joint?

And another record...

Prima di continuare su YouTube nera: