In 1995 when I started my blues bumming expeditions, I made a trip to Natchez, Mississippi, in order to catch my Natchez Bluesbuddy Y.Z. Ealey and his band in a little now-closed juke joint on the outskirts of town. The following is a short account of that night and is excerpted from a letter originally written to a white lesbian friend who had a "thing" for black girls. It is sexist, but the reader should understand its original purpose—the entertainment of a friend.

"The owner of the bar wore a straw cowboy hat with a little pony-tail hanging from under the brim in the back. He was probably the meanest-looking man I ever saw. He was black, of course, and he was huge, some fat but mostly muscle. He had a face so craggy and pock-marked he looked like he'd been shot in the face with a full load of buckshot. Damn, he was ugly. He didn't say a dozen words to me or to anyone else the entire night. He just sat behind and down at the end of the bar and glared all night. If he wasn't behind the bar, he was across the room at the little wooden fence around the DJ equipment, doing the same glaring. Anyone that started trouble in his place would have been crazy.

"Other than myself, there was one other white person in the joint—a fat white girl that tended bar and did all the work while the owner glared. She was an unbelievably fast and efficient bartender and laughed and joked with me and with the customers, most of whom she knew by name. At some point in the evening Y.Z. nodded at her and asked me, ‘How do you like our white black girl?'

"I truthfully answered, ‘She's great!'

"I got to the juke joint about 8:30 and Y.Z.'s band didn't start ‘til 10. The joint didn't have a jukebox, so the owner played DJ and played the blues. I heard damned near every old blues song I ever heard and some I never heard. You should hear Howlin' Wolf at two hundred watts!

"Oh, by the way, the crowd contained two luscious black girls. One wore a little white cotton blouse with the hem ending midway between her undulating C-cup breasts and her navel. Oh, what an expanse of coffee-with-cream colored flesh! And the other one, oh, the other one! About 11 o'clock, a bunch of people came in from a wedding, the men dressed in tuxedos and the women in evening gowns. Y.Z. was playing the blues, so I paid little attention to the juke joint's new well-dressed customers. While Y.Z. played, I noticed him watching something on the dance floor between us, slightly to my right, to his left. I was sitting at the bar. I looked to my right. Out there dancing, slow, to the blues and a foot or so away from her partner, was a black goddess.

"Her skin was dark, African black. Her face and body was that of a model's, but with larger breasts than a model. Her jet-black hair was pulled to the back of her head and dangled down in a profusion of curls and touched her bare shoulders. A dozen or more silver, ringlike necklaces circled her bare black neck and draped over her bare black cleavage. Silver rings circled almost all of her fingers. A dozen or more silver bracelets circled and dangled from both of her trim black wrists. And she wore a slinky, skin-tight and jet-black evening gown. It was long, calf-length, and it clung to her legs and her perfect round butt. And the gown was split up both sides. The splits traveled from her shapely black calves, up her legs, and ended at the line where her panties would have been had she worn panties.

"The awesome contrast of silver and black was something to behold. Such a beauty dressed so lavishly in such a dive was also something to behold. When I tore my eyes away from that contrast and that beauty and looked toward the bandstand again, Y.Z. was grinning at me. He knew I liked what I saw. So I grinned back at him.

"You should have been there—for the music and the beauty.