Teddy’s Juke Joint celebrating 45 years of keeping the blues alive; Party is Saturday

Teddy’s Juke Joint, the world-famous music attraction in Zachary, celebrates its 45th anniversary on Saturday.

Teddy “Lloyd” Johnson — the venue’s cowboy hat-wearing owner and DJ — has booked the Neal family for the special occasion. The Grammy-nominated Kenny Neal, his brother, Lil’ Ray, daughter, Syreeta, and more members of Baton Rouge’s first family of the blues will perform.

Alex V. Cook, the author of “Louisiana Saturday Night: Looking for a Good Time in South Louisiana’s Juke Joints, Honky-Tonks, and Dancehalls,” opens his guidebook with a visit to Teddy’s Juke Joint. Cook’s awestruck admiration for Johnson’s outlandish establishment has only grown since his book’s 2012 publication.

“Teddy’s Juke Joint is magical, the kind of place you can’t believe still exists,” Cooke said last week. “When I first showed up there in 2006, it opened a portal to glittering Louisiana, a reason this place is special. Once you see Teddy carrying on in his cape among the million holiday lights while he rolls out his risqué toasts over R&B songs you’ve never heard before, you are a different person.”

Johnson keeps Christmas lights glowing all year long. His joint’s other ornaments include disco mirror balls, mirror fragments, musical instruments, photos of blues musicians and, hanging from the ceiling, a baby carriage, tricycle and little red wagon.

“I decorated according to what I could afford to do,” Johnson said in a 30th anniversary story that appeared in The Advocate. “Just stuff I refuse to throw away, or somebody threw away, and I got hold to it. I have booths in here that’s older than me.”

Johnson’s fans include Johnny Palazzotto, the local music entrepreneur who founded Baton Rouge’s Slim Harpo Music Awards. In 2010, the Harpo Awards named Johnson one of its blues ambassadors.

“Morgan Freeman spent millions in Clarksdale, Mississippi, to duplicate Teddy’s Juke Joint and the other real juke joints,” Palazzotto said. “But Teddy’s is the real home of downhome blues, the place where legends played.”

Johnson transformed the shotgun house where he was born in 1946 into Teddy’s Juke Joint. He’s had a long run with the place but the past few years haven’t been good. COVID-19 restrictions hit the business especially hard.

“It’s back to full capacity now, but people just ain’t coming out for some reason,” Johnson said on a quiet weekday afternoon.

Despite sparse patronage, Johnson still presents entertainment seven days a week. Tuesdays feature blues band Route 61 at 8 p.m.; Wednesday is the Acoustic Circle with Dixie Rose at 7 p.m. The duo Jelly B and the Wolf appears some Sundays. Johnson spins records at 8 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and, when there’s no live music, Friday and Saturday.

Before Johnson opened Teddy’s Juke Joint in 1979, he painted houses and traveled widely as a nightclub DJ known as the Painter Man.

“I was spinning records all over the country,” he said in 2008. “Everybody was saying: ‘Why don’t you open up your own place, Teddy?’ I made up my mind to go ahead on and open up my place — and I’m still with it.”

At first, his own record spinning was the only entertainment Johnson had at the venue he’d originally named Teddy’s Bar and Lounge. The policy changed when Big Bo Melvin and the Nighthawks became the house band. Members of the Neal family soon played there, too, including the family’s late patriarch Raful Neal — who performed at Teddy’s until his death in 2004.

“Kenny Neal and Lil’ Ray and Frederick, they’ve been playing here all the time,” Johnson said. “And I knew Raful way before I opened the place up.”

Other Teddy’s performers included the king of the Chitlin’ Circuit, Bobby Rush; Grammy-winner Chris Thomas King; Little Jimmy Reed; Smokehouse Porter and Miss Mamie; Doug Brousseau; Sam Hogan; SunDanze Dunston; Jonathon “Boogie” Long; Mississippi’s Eden Brent, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and D.K. Harrell; and New Orleans’ Sam Joyner, Mem Shannon and Guitar Slim Jr.

Johnson and his longtime juke joint have won honors and much media attention. In 2023, the Memphis-based Blues Foundation presented him with its Keeping the Blues Alive Award. National and international news coverage includes numerous New York Times travel stories, such as 2015’s “In Baton Rouge, They’re Still Singing the Blues” and 2014’s “36 Hours in Baton Rouge, La.”

“I’ve been around blues my whole life,” Johnson mused. “The blues is life itself. And jazz and just about everything in America came out of the blues.”

As the 50th anniversary of Teddy’s Juke Joint grows near, Johnson hopes to preside over his life’s work “as long as I can hold out.”

Teddy’s Juke Joint 45th anniversary with the Neal Brothers, Kenny Neal and Syreeta Neal

7 p.m. Saturday

Teddy’s Juke Joint, 16999 Old Scenic Highway, Zachary

$20

teddysjukejoint.com