Jukin’

Your first trip to Teddy’s Juke Joint may leave you questioning the directions. Relax. Have faith. Teddy’s is worth the drive—especially for the Sunday night blues jam.

Teddy’s is out in the country, up in the northern end of the parish. Too far for Baker. Too close for Zachary. It’s a good, old-fashioned country bar. In another region, you might call Teddy’s a roadhouse. Here, a ramshackle bar that serves up good food, strong drink and the blues is a juke joint.

You gotta look carefully. The sign is small and the joint sits in the woods a couple hundred yards down a gravel driveway. It’s the first sign of civilization since you drove by the prison.

The front porch is lit up fluorescent bright. Inside, it’s a different story. The house lights are off, but countless strings of Christmas lights and rope lights crisscross the ceiling, over and around two disco balls. Floods illuminate the stage at the front of the joint and Teddy’s DJ booth at the back. There are lights behind the bar and on electric knick-knacks on the bar.

“It’s a drive, but it’s worth it,” says Larry Garner, one of Baton Rouge’s most accomplished blues musicians. When he’s not playing on tour on Europe, Garner often jams at Teddy’s.

“It’s a real juke joint, or jook joint,” he said, pronouncing jook like book. “Teddy’s is one of the last juke joints.”

It’s authentic. Not manufactured like a House of This or Planet That or Something Rock Café. Teddy’s is real and that’s what keeps Baton Rouge bluesmen making that drive to play.

Lloyd “Teddy” Johnson Jr. opened his place 29 years ago in the house where he grew up. His bed once sat where men now pee. Back then, Teddy was tiring of nights on the road he spent pursuing the DJ career he began in 1970.

“I figured if I opened my own place I would make ALL the money,” he says. “I found out that wasn’t true.”

After looking into renting, his grandmother offered “that little house out back,” Teddy said. “It was just an old house, nobody living in it.”

The house had no bathroom and only a single electric line. His wife Nancy offered her advice: torch the place. Teddy declined, and years of work followed. “We’re still building the driveway,” he said. “I wore out a chainsaw just cutting the trees.”

They built several additions to expand the house into a real juke joint, including a kitchen. The stage takes up half of what was the original front porch. These are basic, down-to-earth renovations. The floor is bare plywood. The air conditioning pours out of a variety of window units.

“Everything in here is second-hand,” Teddy says. “Or third-hand,” Nancy adds.

For instance, most of the small tabletops came from home construction sites where Teddy salvaged wood scraps from holes cut for sinks into countertops, bolting them to table legs.

“Some things, I picked up off the side of the road,” he said.

The décor in Teddy’s has a homey, haphazard feel. Banners and promotional posters for a spectrum of beer and liquor brands cover the walls. Old CDs strung together flutter in the A/C breeze, along with bright plastic spirals that spin.

“Beware pick pockets and loose women” signs and the ubiquitous out-of-state license plates are tacked to the walls.

The bar’s namesake is a continuing theme. Two bright chrome Teddy Bear hubcaps flank on the wall behind the stage. A painted sign featuring a smiling teddy bear decorates the DJ booth.

With his big smile, rings on every beefy finger, bright suits and hats (cowboy or top) and the occasional cape, Teddy is as welcoming and authentic as his place. “I’ve been wearing capes since I was 6 years old.”

That style has helped keep his Teddy’s Juke Joint open this long, as has his fairly recent dedication to live music. Teddy has hosted a steady bill of live acts from the road and from the Baton Rouge area since he started his Sunday night jams more than two years ago.

Veteran keyboard player “Hoodoo” Jimmy Simpson and guitar player Weldon “Sundanze” Dunston came to Teddy after Swamp Mama’s closed. The now-defunct downtown bar had hosted a Sunday night jam, and Hoodoo Jimmy and Sundanze talked Teddy into taking up the slack.

“Teddy had had a history of being a disco and doing live music,” Simpson says.

Teddy’s has something crucial to a Sunday jam: a kitchen. Local liquor laws allow restaurants to sell alcohol on Sunday, but not bars. Restaurants have kitchens, bars don’t.

The jam draws amateurs of various skills and seasoned pros like Garner and some of Baton Rouge’s accomplished bluesmen, like Lil’ Ray Neal and Oscar “Harpo” Davis. James Johnson, the “chicken scratch” guitarist on Slim Harpo’s 1966 hit, “Baby, Scratch My Back,” alternates with Sundanze running the jam with Simpson.

You never know who might show up. One Sunday, Neal and Garner came out, along with four amateur sax players. A couple of Sundays later, a surfeit of guitar and bass players.

A professional band leader like Garner can relax at a jam and have fun. “Nobody expects the O’Jays on Sunday night.”

In an area with a strong—but waning—blues tradition, the Sunday jam “helps keep the blues alive,” Garner says. “Younger musicians don’t know anything about the old style like John Lee Hooker or R.L. Burnside. I think they learn a lot at these sessions.”

In addition to blues fans making the drive from Baton Rouge, Teddy says he’s drawing culture vacationers, people from across the nation and from around the world who seek out the joint.

Teddy pointed to a customer who just sat down. “He’s a professor from France.”

Sure enough, Bernard Cerquiglini is a professor at LSU—the director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies. And he’s a Teddy’s regular.

Cerquiglini makes the trip for the music, the friendship, the authenticity—and the food.

“This is the best place in Baton Rouge,” he says, just before he tucks into a plate of red beans and rice—beans like you can’t find outside South Louisiana; beans with a deep, smoky-spicy flavor that leave a glow, but no burn; juke-joint beans.

Earlier this year Cerquiglini brought a reporter friend from Le Monde, France’s top newspaper, to Teddy’s. In March, a piece about Teddy’s appeared in Le Monde’s culture column.

The trip to Teddy’s from Paris may be a lot longer, but it’s well worth the effort.