I Was There When The Blues Was Red Hot by Fernando Jones

Show Advisory Warning: This show contains live Blues, gunshots and sirens in it. And the show touches on sensitive topics of race, class, and gender and is intended for a mature viewing audience.

Feel free to wear your favorite 1970s outfit to the show.

Historic Overview: I Was There When The Blues Was Red Hot: The Interactive Dramatic Comedy was first staged inside the historic Palm Tavern (446 East 47th Street), owned and operated by “Mama” Gerri Oliver, on Fridays, October 2nd and 9th in 1998. It was only scheduled to run twice but ran for 259 performances until the Palm Tavern’s forced closing by the City of Chicago in July 2001.

Introduction: This interactive dramatic comedy tells the story of how nine friends survive and continually reinvent themselves as Black Blues people in the mid-1970s. This instant classic is a raw and honest look inside their lives through the lens of the proverbial establishment, race, class, and gender. From a cultural perspective, all constantly re-examine these topics throughout the evening. In search of Equitable Inclusion, long before it became a catchphrase, the characters continually signify and debate while eerily predicting the future of the Blues in the year 2000.

Synopsis: It’s Saturday, July 13th in 1974 at 9 o’clock on a hot 86-degree summer night on the Southside of Chicago, in 1974. The night is still, and it’s a great night to be grown. Random police sirens and barbeque smoke from Nanda’s Smokehouse lie still in the darkness like a roach suspended in animation on a white, cigar smoke-stained living room wall at a thirty-three-degree angle — just before it meets the cracked ceiling when you have a house full of company. Parked outside are freshly washed and Turtle waxed late-model Cadillac Eldorados and Coupe DeVilles . . . “Hogs,” Buick Deuce and a Quarters, and Oldsmobile Delta 88s belonging to the Blues Lovers inside. To the passersby, it looks like a General Motors Car show.

Needless to say, the real action is taking place inside of T’s. T’s is a popular, jammed-packed, world-renowned, four-step basement Blues club residing in a dilapidated, three-story, Draper & Kramer, low-income, six-unit apartment building with only one entrance; no matter how loud the music gets or how rambunctious the patrons are, the tenants never complain to the landlord for they, too, party all night long as well. Besides, this weekend ritual is a prerequisite for them going to church come Sunday morning.

The joint is run by the club’s no-nonsense, female namesake T.  She’s the cashier, cook and bouncer. Tonight the bar is filled with an all-Black, blue-collar audience dressed like they just stepped out of Jet Magazine. The men are topped off by hats and big apple caps cocked ace-deuce; the women are crowned sporting either Afros, Afro Puffs, cornrows, or Naomi Sims wigs. And oh yeah, live Blues is rockin' the house! 

In all, 117 people are in here, including the band, though the occupancy sign suggests that the place can only hold 90. T knows the fire marshal and watch commander, therefore, it is what it is. Meaningful jive talk, laughter, tall tales, stale cologne, funk, live music, the back-and-forth bickering over sliding scale liquor prices, and, oh yes, the smell of deep-fried catfish, perch, and chicken thighs permeate the air. Remember down here at T’s it’s free to get in and $10 to get out!

Cover photo by Glenn Kaupert

This production is presented by the B. Kay Foundation at the ETA Creative Arts Foundation as a fundraiser for Blues Camp International founded by Fernando Jones. We provide free Blues Camps and workshops all year for children in Chicago and nationwide without economic, gender, race or religious discrimination. For more info on how you can be one of our Blues Angels visit BluesKids.com.

Press

“There have been other plays and productions which have been produced in nightclubs or taverns, however, it is significant that Jones’ Blues musical drama is playing to packed houses.” - Earl Calloway, Chicago Defender

“The actors turn in performances that are as believable as any real-life scene.”

- Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune: Tempo Section