By Kim "Fest Junkie" Welsh

Muddy Waters Annual Birthday Celebration “Mud-In”

Teddy’s Juke Joint is the last authentic “jook” in Louisiana and Teddy and Nancy Johnson hosted the Muddy Waters Annual Birthday Celebration “Mud-In” on April 3, 2010. Wouldn’t you know it? Fest Junkie and McKinley Morganfield aka Muddy Waters share the same birthday! So, I headed up to Teddy’s, a south Louisiana institution located in a converted wood-frame house in rural Zachary where Teddy was born. It was a beautiful day and the front yard was filled with blues fans enjoying the music of Dixie Rose, Richard Stiles, “Pineapple,” The Circuitbreakers, Henry Gray, and Lil Ray Neal; the latter two were honored to have played with Muddy Waters, the Father of Chicago blues. This mannish boy was born on April 4, 1915. Generally considered to be one of the greatest bluesmen of all time, his career spanned over thirty years. Teddy’s musicians proved that Muddy’s mojo is still working! Nancy’s kitchen was busy turning out barbeque ribs and chicken, red beans, potato salad, fried turkey wings and chicken, hamburgers, and other “soul food” favorites. Folks played “Stump,” a game involving throwing a hammer and pounding nails into a stump with one stroke. Everyone was friendly and jovial.

Owner, Lloyd “Teddy” Johnson smiles constantly and is a natural to own a juke joint. He started playing guitar when he was five and began wearing capes when he was six… some things never change. Now he just collects guitars and he showed off a few, including a Flying V that Bryan Lee gave him for his birthday. He also modeled one of his many capes. “Ninety percent of the bands I book is blues,” Teddy said. “Because I love the blues. That’s what I was raised on and mostly really what I know about.”

Although Johnson opened Teddy’s Juke Joint with his record-spinning self as house entertainment, he’s been booking blues artists for most of the 31 years the club has been open. Johnson opened his juke joint in 1979. Although he’d been an in-demand disc jockey since 1970 known as the Painter Man because he hung his brush and roller up at gigs to advertise his painting business, Johnson thought being his own deejay in his own club was a way for him to make all the money. “I’d be my own deejay and get the profit off the liquor, too,” he said. “But I didn’t understand the way it worked.”

A year or two after Teddy’s opened, Big Bo Melvin and the Nighthawks, a band looking for a place to practice, talked Johnson into letting them be his house band. Other musicians began appearing at Teddy’s, including Little Jimmy Reed, the one-man band, and such Baton Rouge legacy artists as Raful Neal and Whisperin’ Smith. “Silas Hogan, those type of cats would play at suppers, like an outdoor party where people sold chicken and fish,” Johnson recalled. “They’d play at these things and I met them. And then a lot of them, before they died, started playing here.”

The house where Johnson was born in 1946 serves as the original Teddy’s Juke Joint structure. He added several rooms since he acquired the building from his mother, who’d inherited it from her mother. Johnson and his juke joint have had their challenges through the decades, everything from the venue’s relatively obscure location to zoning issues to changing liquor laws and demographics.

“By being out here in the country, it was like a no-no,” he said. “It’s been a fight from the day I decided to open up the place. It’s still a fight. Because what they’re trying to do, all the little places like this, they’re trying to shut them down. It’s just kind of unheard of, especially a black business man, staying in one spot in the state of Louisiana this many years, and the building belongs to him.”

Patrons enjoy the juke joint’s unique look and homey atmosphere. The decoration includes mirror fragments, Christmas lights, teddy bears, and 36-inch and 12-inch mirror disco balls. A 12-foot-long piece of driftwood decorated with musical instruments hangs from the ceiling. A baby carriage, tricycle, seasonal and a little red wagon (like the wagon Johnson had when he was a kid) hang from the ceiling.

“I decorated according to what I could afford to do,” Johnson explained. “Just stuff I refuse to throw away, or somebody threw away and I got hold to it. My building, basically, is built out of other people’s junk. I have booths in here that’s older than me. I have a black-and-white TV that I bought for my wife 30 years ago. It still works.”

Such widely traveling blues musicians as Eden Brent, the New Orleans-based Bryan Lee and Baton Rouge’s Larry Garner play on Teddy’s stage. Garner even mentions Teddy’s Juke Joint in his song, “Raised in the Country,” a track on his latest European CD, “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow.”

“It’s the last juke joint on Highway 61, man,” Garner said. “It reminds me of the old Tabby’s Blues Box, except it’s bigger and it’s got a more country atmosphere to it. It’s definitely a country juke joint. Not j-u-k-e, but j-o-o-k… jook joint.” (Pronounced correctly, it rhymes with “book.”)

“I love Teddy’s,” Lee said. “Teddy and his wife are just wonderful people. They feed us after the gig, they take real good care of the musicians. Anybody who loves the blues needs to go to Teddy’s. It’s a piece of history, man. And when Teddy goes, that’s it. There’ll be no more Teddy’s Juke Joints.”

Your junco partner,
Kim AKA Fest Junkie