“I worked at the cemetery this morning cutting gas and cleaning up headstones at Pine Hill Cemetery. I found a few more graves. I have had that cemetery for about 20-25 years. I am retired, but I like to be busy. I hurt my hand today cutting grass and it’s swelling. I hope I can still play tonight. I play before the band starts. This isn’t a club, it is a juke joint. It started after traveling to Mississippi, New Orleans, Chicago and Detroit. We didn’t have a place for the blues in Birmingham. I am trying to keep the blues and this juke joint alive. Sometimes we have about 200 people on a Saturday night. People from across the country will be here tonight. People show up on nights we don’t have music just to stop in and have a beer and see the place. Sometimes I just sit out here and play.

I knew a lot of people in the Mississippi Delta. I played with T-Model Ford in Jackson, Mississippi a couple of times and he has played here. I knew BB King for over 60 years and played songs with him for a long time. So many blues men have passed on, such as Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, but I try to help keep their music alive.

The blues is a feeling. When people play the blues it brings them from the back to the front. It was started by black people, but all people liked it because it was a life story being told about people. I grew up in Uniontown and my story is a life on the mend. I want to bring people together and we all walk the road home safely. Wherever there is good, evil will be present but good will overcome evil. God said it would. I know the end times are coming soon.

Henry “Gip” Gipson died in October, 2019. He was 99 years old.