Designed and established by the Southeast African American community, the juke joint, pronounced “jook joint”, is the vernacular term for an informal establishment featuring music, dancing, gambling, and drinking. The term “juke” derives from the Gullah word joog or jug, meaning rowdy or disorderly.

“Gullah” refers to the Gullah Geechee people on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. This community of Southerners have direct lineage from the Igbo people of Nigeria. There have been many influences in modern entertainment and music that pull from the Gullah community. Filmmaker Julie Dash, directed Daughters of the Dust, a film that shed light on the culture, heritage, and story of the Gullah Geechee people. Also, song-writer, singer, dancer, actor and entertainer, Beyonce, based many of the visual concepts of her Lemonade album off of Julie Dash’s Daughter of the Dust film about the Gullah Geechee peoples. 

Many southern cultural norms are rooted and woven into African heritage. I believe the Juke Joint is a perfect display of that intersection. Originally, the music of juke joints relied on two instruments: the fiddle and the banjo. The banjo, known by many Southerners, is historically a West African instrument. 

Writer Greg Allen wrote, The Banjo's Roots, Reconsidered, an NPR article examining the West African roots of the well-known African American instrument, the banjo. Allen writes, “The banjo came to America with the slaves (enslaved Africans), and musicologists have long looked in West Africa for its predecessors. Much of the speculation has centered on the ngoni and the xalam, two hide-covered stringed instruments from West Africa that bear some resemblance to the banjo.”