Since the late 70s, veteran Chicago blues harpist Billy Branch has been leading workshops and student concerts with the Blues in the Schools program, teaching elementary and high school kids in Chicago and around the country. And he likes to start his classes with a call-and-response ritual:
“The blues are the facts of life!”
The Palm Tavern—or Gerri’s Palm Tavern, as the bar at 446 E. 47th Street became known—wasn’t a blues club. In fact, most of the time it didn’t book live music at all. But from the 30s through the mid-60s, during Bronzeville’s heyday as a nexus of African-American culture, aspiration, and achievement, the Palm Tavern was one of the neighborhood’s crown jewels. Its original owner was numbers kingpin and entrepreneur James “Genial Jim” Knight, a former Pullman porter who was held in such high esteem that the public voted him “Mayor of Bronzeville” in a hugely popular informal election organized in 1934 by the Chicago Defender. The Palm was where the community’s elite convened to relax, celebrate, or mix business with pleasure. Visiting celebrities such as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, and Joe Louis (whose personal chef Knight hired for the club) rubbed shoulders with ward heelers, civic leaders, political aspirants, and everyday neighborhood people, sipping cocktails and chatting in the shadow of the potted palms that gave the establishment its name. Oliver, who’d moved to Chicago from her native Jackson, Mississippi, in the mid-40s, bought the business from Knight in 1956.
“After that, I just kept coming back. I’d go see her, and people would on occasion bring her to my gigs, and I became endeared to her to the point where she would refer to me as her son; she was kind of like a godmother figure. When my mother would come in from the west coast, we’d always make it a point to take her down there, and they’d spend time together.”
Oliver stayed in Chicago for a few years, living in a senior citizens’ complex on Cottage Grove. Eventually she could no longer safely live alone, and her family retrieved her and brought her to the nursing home in Jackson. The idea for a song to honor her was already germinating in Billy Branch’s mind.
The song’s narrative follows Gerri Oliver from her childhood in Mississippi—home of Jim Crow and “strange fruit hanging from the southern leaves,” as Branch paraphrases the famous lyrics—to “the Promised Land” in the Windy City, where she had to face down the “Chicago style of northern segregation.” Branch evokes the vibrant community that buoyed the Palm in its heyday, describing it as a showcase for “Bronzeville’s black nobility” and listing some of the famous faces you could see there—among them Duke Ellington, Redd Fox, Quincy Jones, Dinah Washington, Nat “King” Cole, and Louis Armstrong. When he relates the tale of political opportunism and back-room dealing that led to the club’s demise (“The lady in the hat would not let her come back”), his voice toughens with rage. In this context, his vow to “see Miss Gerri one more time” widens into a promise to honor not only the woman herself but also the vision that impelled her (“Gerri’s burning fire”)—her determination to escape oppression and live as part of a thriving community with its own institutions becomes a symbol of the African-American struggle for freedom and justice.
Fri 2/13, 9:30 PM, and Sat 2/14, 10 PM Rosa’s Lounge $15-$20 21+
