Jalopy Theatre. It’s also a bar. And a music school. I feel like a music school should have a bar.

Back in the first days of NYC I wasn’t aware of any country culture going on. I suppose if someone asked I’d have to have said, sure, there’s country/Americana/Appalachian music happening in NYC, because, well, everything is happening here. It wasn’t real to me. It was just a hypothesis that had an extremely high likelihood of being correct.

When I lived in Flatbush I’d have to change trains at Atlantic station. And one day while hustling from the B/Q line to the 4 train there they were. A moonshine-jug and shoestring band. They were busking below the platforms. All in overalls and beards. Actual jug being played. Actual washboard being raked across. Actual makeshift git-fiddle. Them boys in that outfit were singing songs from the blue hills. Their cardboard plaque requesting donations read that they were from Georgia. I listened for a minute, then dropped a couple bucks in their bucket. The damnedest thing, they were. I wish I had taken a picture.

I like what makes it up here to NYC from my sordid digs of home. The music. That one good thing. The racism left behind, the classism cast aside, that insipid conservatism slaked off to fester. (Conservatism. To conserve. To set in amber the status quo. Not even the present status quo, but revert to the old status quo. They are not conservationists, but reversionists. They want to go back. Back to what? Any time before now was pretty shitty for women, minorities, gays, children, and times aren’t really the greatest for them now. So, fuck the conservatives and the fundamentalists for their literally backwards aspirations. Fuck ‘em where they breathe. I thank you kindly for indulging this aside.).

So, yeah, Jalopy. If the moonshine-jug and shoe string band I caught busking in the subway was a sign, then Jalopy is the destination of my pilgrimage. I didn’t come to NYC looking for home, nor have I been so homesick as to wish something from the South would come to claim me. I’ve never been one to long for the days of yore. In fact, it has been my motto that “fuck the days of yore.” Go ahead and quote me on that. Jalopy with its dive-bar-chic barroom replete with an upright piano reminds me of secondhand music shops that are kept like junk stores in the south and my favorite bar, Freddy’s.

You can find it in Red Hook at the corner of Columbia and Hamilton. The music featured is primarily folk, bluegrass, and country. So, if you’re like me and embarrassed of the news that makes its way from your country home, and frustrated because you know those stubborn and curmudgeonly states are capable of so much more, so much better, then come to Jalopy and sit among the church pews of her theater and hear that new song from the old country.

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