Teddy’s survived on steady diet of the blues

• By JOHN WIRT
• Music critic
• Published: Jun 27, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Is Teddy’s Juke Joint the South’s last juke joint? Well, it’s not the absolute last genuine juke joint in America, but it’s definitely among the last genuine juke joints within easy reach of Baton Rouge.

Naturally, blues is the house specialty at Teddy’s Juke Joint, a south Louisiana institution located in a converted wood-frame house in rural Zachary,  “Ninety percent of the bands I book is blues,” owner Lloyd “Teddy” Johnson said recently. “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 30 years the club’s been open. And blues is definitely on the menu during the venue’s 30th anniversary week, running Sunday, June 29, through July 6. Performers include Baton Rouge blues legend James Johnson, blues legend in the making Lil’ Ray Neal and rising blues act Josh Garrett.

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, too, 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 served as the original Teddy’s Juke Joint structure. He’s 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 atmosphere. The decoration includes mirror fragments, Christmas lights, a 36-inch mirror ball and a 12-inch mirror ball. A 12-foot-long piece of driftwood decorated with musical instruments hangs above the bar. A baby carriage, tricycle 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 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.