“American roots music at its most soulful and authentic. Excellent.” – Boston Phoenix

“This wonderful documentary [is] a definite good buy for blues fans.” – Jazz & Blues Report

“One of the most important Mississippi music films ever made.” – Planet Weekly (Jackson, MS)

LAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI JUKES is Robert Mugge’s exploration of Mississippi juke joints, the rustic, often dilapidated music venues where, early in the last century, itinerant blues musicians played for plantation workers and others, creating a powerful new music which soon migrated to Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, and elsewhere. Of course, even as this music spread around the world, changing as it went, it continued to have a strong presence in the state where it was born, a fact clearly shown by Mugge’s 1991 film DEEP BLUES. And yet, in the decade after the release of DEEP BLUES, artists who had appeared in that earlier film began passing away, and the jukes where they and others had played became increasingly scarce. So, Mugge decided to make a new film about what was being lost.

LAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI JUKES includes the following narrative threads: an illustrated introduction to Mississippi jukes, discussions of Ground Zero Blues Club and the Subway Lounge, a history of the Summers Hotel and the Civil Rights struggles that both preceded and accompanied it, and a portrait of the public movement to save the Subway Lounge after the building that housed it was condemned. Like most music documentaries, this film alternates between musical performance and related conversation, and interviewees of note include owners of both venues, Subway patrons, singers and musicians, Jackson politicians, a Jackson newspaper reporter, celebrated blues photographer Dick Waterman, and Mississippi blues author Steve Cheseborough.

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