Store Porching: Mamie Davis
Mamie Galore-Davis (1940-2001) was born in Erwin, Mississippi, and moved to Greenville as a youngster. She sang gospel as a youngster and then with a local blues band, moving on to work with Ike and Tina Turner and then Little Milton. She recorded for several labels in the 1960s and lived in Chicago and Louisiana before returning to Greenville, Mississippi, in 1972. Interviewed at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Washington, D.C., July 1991.
Barry Lee Pearson
University of Maryland
“I guess I got started when I was real small, because I was always around people playing guitars and singing the blues. And I liked to hang around them and I would sing the songs I heard them singing. Then as I started to grow up from a little child, I – we were church-going people – I always sang in church. I was in youth choir, then on to the junior choir, then when I come out of high school I started singing with a local band in my hometown and from there I got to do work with Ike and Tina Turner as an Ikette. And from there I got to travel quite a few years with Little Milton. And then I’ve done some things on my own.
“I traveled with Little Milton four or five different times, at different times. I just came off the road with him in 1989. I had been along with him for about three years then.
But it all started when I was a little bitty kid. I always liked to sing and dance. The first music I heard was music by people like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson, BB King and those people because back during that time, there were women singing the blues, but they were not as known as the men. And it was like in the latter years they started opening ways for women to come out and express themselves in the blues. But at first it was just all men.
I think that women have always had that certain sense of pride, and back during that time people termed the blues as dirty music. And they said like it was the devil’s music. And I think that kind of kept them back in the shade for a while. But then I guess they decided maybe we can come out and do it now. And we won’t be looked down on as dirty people for doing this.
My folks always knew I was musically inclined, because I’m gonna tell you a little story that happened to me when I was four. We had just moved into Greenville out of the country like the rural area. And the first day we moved into this house there was a little girl. I met a little girl about my age that stayed two or three doors down. She had lived there for a time. So she asked my mom if I could walk around the corner with her, you know, that evening. Mom said yes, and when we got around the corner there was this joint and I heard all this music going. So at first I was just standing there trying to peep up in there to see what was going on. And that little girl kept saying, ‘Come on, Mamie, we’re gonna get in trouble. We gotta go.’
But I was so involved in what they were doing, because she went on and left me. And then so when I looked around she was gone. So I went on up in the place, because at home, people would take their children to these kinds of places. So I figured it was all right to go in there. So I went up in there. The next thing I know I was standing around the juke box singing along with it and dancing. People were throwing nickels and dimes up and I was enjoying myself.
Then it dawned on me that I had to get out of there. So when I came out I didn’t know which way to go, because like I said, we had just moved into this house. I didn’t know my way home but I was just right around the corner. But I didn’t know that.
And so I just started to walking. My mom, when I got home, my mom said that they had been looking for me all day. They’d had the police looking for me and everything. And she said I just stumbled upon my house. See, I was walking down the street heading toward my house and I was just walking and singing this song that they had been playing on the jukebox. It was a song that goes ‘Buzz me buzz me Baby.’ See, I was walking and just singing and I only knew one line, singing that one line over and over. And she said she realized then that I was musically inclined, you know, after she got through whipping me for being gone all day.
But in the beginning they tried to steer me toward gospel music, because that’s what I really started in. when I first sang in public it was in the church. But somewhere along the line I got swayed and I chose the blues, and I suppose one day I might go back to the gospel music. So far I’ve chosen blues. To me they don’t differ very much. It’s basically the words. But it’s all heart and soul music. So I think it’s basically the same.
You never know what’s going to happen to anywhere you are now it’s hard to say. You just keep your hand in the Lord’s hand and hope he’ll take care of you wherever you are.”
Q – Were people rough on you because you were a woman in clubs?
“I’ve occasionally had it happen to me. Not in the past few years, but in the earlier years I had that happen but I was so determined and so in love with what I was doing – I never let it get to me. It eventually got to where it just didn’t make a distinction whether you were a woman or a man. Just if you were able to do whatever it was, you could just come and do it. And everybody accepted you. But at first the men that sang the blues were like kind of down on us. They didn’t feel like we should be doing that. But I think that they were just afraid that we were maybe gonna overstep them and their market. But it wasn’t that. It’s a big field and anybody can join in, you know. But I haven’t had any problems.
I know I never had any interest in playing any instrument. I just wanted to sing. But I suppose if I had had interest I could have learned because most of the people that I come up with, they didn’t have like music schools and that type of stuff. They just learned from what they heard and what they felt. And I could have done that too, because I was always around some type of musical instrument like guitar and piano. But I never had enough interest to learn. I just wanted to sing.
A jook house or a jook joint is unlike the clubs. It’s just a joint. It might be a big old building. And they got some homemade chairs and some tables in there and they got old raggedy shades. And it’s not sophisticated like at all, but it’s just where people go and they just have fun. They are places that when you go in you wouldn’t suppose that it was a beautiful place because it’s not, but once you are in there you have a beautiful time so you forget about what it look like.
So that’s what a jook house is. But then also a jook house was called – there was times before they had a lot of joints, they were called jook houses because it was always in somebody’s front room of their house. They would have like a jukebox in there and they would have a stove where they’d be frying fish and chicken and they’d have a refrigerator full of beer and pops and stuff. And all of this was going on in one room.
They’d have somebody over here shooting dice, somebody over here making music, and that was called the jook house. Then when they started buildings away from your house, then they were called jook joints. But we still have a lot of those. We have some jook houses out in the country and we have jook joints at the same time.
They had the house parties, but we didn’t call them suppers; we just called them going to the ‘jook.’ My understanding, it’s from jook – means you’re going to have fun. You’re going to party, dance, and get drunk or whatever. We don’t have so many of those now, but we have some – and believe it or not, you have more fun at those places than you do if you go up into the city into a night club. You have more fun and it’s much safer. Fish fries. That’s basically the same thing.
Then we also had – we had a store out in the country. We had this one store they call it the General Store, but in the store you could find anything that you were going to need was in this one store. I guess that’s why they called it general.
And this store had a porch and on the weekends my grandparents and my parents would always say we’re going ‘store porching’ on Saturday. ‘We going store porching.’ And what they would do, it would be somebody that would play the music. They’d sit on one end of the porch and play the music and the other part of the porch was for dancing and they called that store porching. But everybody danced on the porch of the store. We did this on maybe Friday nights, but basically Saturday nights. But on Sunday there was none of that because you had to go to church all day Sunday. Sunday night then they had to stay home. Then they had to go to work on Monday. But Saturday night was the jook night.”
Dr. Barry Lee Pearson, Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland stands as the most steadfast supporter of the local acoustic blues scene in the greater Washington, D.C., area and beyond. As a musician, author, college lecturer, folklorist, and personal friend to the musicians, he has been the voice of this regional blues scene.