Tom's Place: A Juke Joint in Wilson, NC
“Shoe polish: the young girls won’t dance with an old man."
In 1987, after spending a couple years asking about blues players and juke joints in eastern North Carolina, someone took me Tom’s Place outside of Wilson.
Cotton field at sunset.
Back in the day, Tom’s had been part of the Chitlin Circuit. Tour busses would find their way back into the dusty fields and disgorge the likes of B.B. King and James Brown, who had both played there along with many other notables. Before them, a couple generations of older Blues singers, too.
Like many jukes, Tom's had started as just a room of his home, furniture pushed back or moved out, a little moonshine and fried fish to sell, a musician or two. After he had a clientele he added a room. Then a few more.
By the time I got to Tom’s, he’d long ago moved out of his little wooden juke house and into a new little brick ranch he build on the property with the profits.
There were roof lines running in every conceivable direction, and inside, unexpected steps up and down–it was a rabbit warren of interlinking rooms with several bars–and from the mid-80s on, two disco mirror balls and turntables and a sound booth for a DJ, rather than a stage for live musicians.
I'd guess Tom was in his mid-70s when I met him, though he looked much younger.
When I got to know him a bit better, I commented about how young he looked, given how long the joint had been in operation–not asking his age exactly, just commenting on how good he looked.
Tom smiled, touched his mustache and his eyebrows with a finger, and said,
“Shoe polish. The young girls won’t dance with an old man."
All I could do was smile and nod.
I asked Tom if there were still people around who used to come and listen to the old Carolina Bluesmen back in the days of Barbecue Bob, Blind Boy Fuller, Sonny Terry, Peg Leg Sam, and Brownie McGhee.
“There’re a few."
Thinking of George Higgs and Bud Powell, I asked, “If I could get some of my Blues friends to come and play on an afternoon, could you see if you could get some of those folks to come? I’d love to videotape the scene and interview people about how it was here, back in the day.”
“I think we could do that,” Tom said.
So, we settled on a date in the early summer, a Saturday, early afternoon, before his money crowd would come in for the evening with the DJ.
I arranged for a videographer and the coordinator of the Folklife Section of the North Carolina Arts Council to join us. On the appointed day, I loaded my sound equipment in the trunk of the old Volvo, stopped by to caravan with George and Bud, and we all set off for Wilson.
On the outskirts of town, we turned off a rural track onto a dusty farm road that led back, much as a mile and a half through windbreaks, soybean or peanut fields, heading to Tom’s little compound of buildings hidden behind a line of trees, well out of sight from the paved road.
About a mile in, a big railroad crossing gate with a stop sign on it blocked our way–a wide expanse of bare ground on either side of it. I'd never seen it before. Someone had clearly appropriated it from somewhere.
The absurdity of its placement and existence made me flash briefly on Fellini’s films or the toll booth in Blazing Saddles. (If there were an American Fellini, he would definitely be documenting the American South).
There was a Black biker in sleeveless leathers wearing chains and a Tarboro motorcycle gang logo manning the gate. He had a chest like a beer keg and pumped-up arms. Fans of irony, his gang probably called him 'Tiny.'
I stopped at the gate and greeted him, "Hey."
'Tiny' said, “It’s ten bucks per car.”
“Tom knows we’re coming. I’m bringing the musicians.”
“Ten bucks.”
"We're the entertainment."
“It’s ten bucks. No exceptions.”
“Okay, but don’t charge the guys behind me, they’re with the band...”
He raised the gate.
George had to give him ten bucks, too. And Mary Anne McDonald with the Arts Council, did as well. Three cars; thirty bucks.
We drove on around a windbreak and came within sight of the juke to find a hundred bikes parked with military precision in the sun. Two compatible Black motorcycle gangs were having a field day, and it was in full swing.
Tom had been saving the date for us, but got a better offer from the clubs and just neglected to let me know. He shrugged and said, we could run our extension cords through a window from one of the Disco mirrorball rooms and set up outside.
So, not undaunted (but just a little daunted), we set up the PA and microphones and guitar amps, put a couple of chairs outside, pointed the speakers away from the house where the disco and old R&B records were playing, and tried to make the best of it while most of the gang members and Tom were dancing with some pretty girls inside.
There were no local people around who’d been there back in the day. And it became clear there’d be no real usable documentary video from the scene. But George and Bud soldiered on and sang a bunch of tunes.
Eventually, some of the bikers came around the corner of the joint to see what was happening, beers in hand, and listened to the old men. One said:
“I like this a lot. It reminds me of my granddad. He used to play like that.”
As the afternoon dragged on, we wound up with an appreciative little subset of bikers. George and Bud played for about an hour before we gave up, packed up the gear, bought a few beers from the bikers, or Tom, and joined the scene.
Walking down the long line of bikes gleaming in the sun, each stamped with the decorative elements of its owner, I fell into conversation with some of the guys.
This was their annual field day which they shared with another local gang. They used to fight each other, but realizing that they had a more formidable common enemy in the local whites and police, they’d joined forces and buried whatever hatchets needed burying. Their field day was a way of reinforcing the bonds of shared suffering under the white power structure in eastern North Carolina and keeping the peace safely, as most jukes were, out of sight of the white community.
Looking for all the world like a Hell’s Angel, one of the gang members told me:
“We’re more a social club than a gang, really.
"We hold car washes to raise money for Muscular Dystrophy and shit.
Most of us go to the same church.”
A Black Christian motorcycle gang lay well outside the limits of my expectations.
“Now, we know people are afraid of us–and we’re not above getting fifty or sixty bikes together for a ride to a little town here like Sims.
"We’ll pull up at a crossroad outside of town, park our bikes, and wait for the cops
to show up." They always do, looking all nervous and afraid.”
“Good afternoon officers,” we say. “Nice day for a ride, isn’t it?”
They were Christian bikers but they weren’t above flexing their muscles a bit, tweaking and triggering the prejudices of their white neighbors and the law.
“We’re peaceful, but they don’t need to know that.”
I smiled and nodded. We drank our beers and walked down the line as I admired the bikes.
“This one’s mine,” he said and rattled off the specs, horsepower, special hardware, and customizations he’d made to it.
I asked him, complaining a bit, "Why do they have to be so loud?"
"People will pull right into us. They don't see us. But they hear us."
I had never considered barely muffled motorcycles as a bid for highway safety; it put a different cast on my irritation.
That day didn't turn out as I hoped or expected, but it was a fine and memorable afternoon in Wilson for us all. We laughed about it then, and have since.
Fifteen years or so later, I got an email from one of Tom's sons, asking about my interest in Tom's Place and my time with his father. The internet made finding people, even passing acquaintances easier. We corresponded briefly. Tom had passed. The place was for sale.
Time has taken its toll. The Lakota are said to believe that so long as anyone or anything someone has touched remains, they remain. It feels true.
Thanks for being here.
Scott Ainslie
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