Dee Clarke & Frank Adams, Eutaw, Alabama

Frank Adams performs with the Dee Clarke band at a Eutaw, Alabama, juke joint, 1970s.

“She doesn’t have to be Lena Horne
She can be from Eutaw, Alabama, and even country born.”
     -- Dee Clarke in Eutaw, 1970s

“What was it called? The Eutaw club, I guess. It didn’t have a name—it was a place you went when everything had failed.”
     -- Frank Adams, 2013

In the 1970s, Frank Adams of Birmingham played a Eutaw, Alabama, juke joint in a rock and blues band led by local singer and organist Dee Clarke. One night at the club was captured on this recording from Adams’s personal collection. A jazz-trained musician and educator, Adams recalled his experience with the band in the 2012 book Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man, an oral autobiography drawn from interviews with Burgin Mathews:

“I was playing on the weekends with a rock band—Dee Clarke’s band—and they played strictly rock and roll. We played at a place down right outside of Tuscaloosa: it was a little barn, where the crowd came in at eight o’clock, and they would dance and sweat, perspiring all night long. I had been playing the clarinet and the alto saxophone, but this rock music demanded that I play tenor saxophone, so I had to develop myself on that; I didn’t get to play the alto much then, because the tenor was the thing that was popular in the rock and roll bands—big, heavy sound. I could never get a sound like Paul Gonsalves, but I worked to get a real heavy sound.

“I told you about the experience I had with the blues guys, where they would put some sand on the floor and rub it--well, this was just a little bit above that. It was an enjoyable experience to see the other side of town, and the liquor is flowing and all that kind of thing. Dee was a fellow who could really sing the blues, and we had a guitar player and a drummer. We only had one horn in the band, and that was me. We didn’t have as many pieces as most of the rock bands had, but that was to make more money; we cut it down to about four or five pieces. And music reading was out of the picture, but they would come close to imitating whatever record was popular. If you could play ‘Shotgun’ or James Brown, ‘I Feel Good’—they liked to hear that kind of thing, and you could play solos and solos and solos until they were about to fall out.

“The audience wouldn’t have much money. They waited for Saturday night to drink alcohol and have fun, and that audience would be packed. Of course, I appreciated knowing that I’d bring some money back home when I went down there--but in these places you had no possibility of getting a tip. That was out of the question; they could hardly get the money to come in the place and pay for the booze. They didn’t have the money to say, ‘Here’s something for doing a good job.’ They’d just holler and scream, to let you know they appreciated you.”

The first track, below, is the complete audio from Adams’s original Eutaw tape, which begins with the saxophonist warming up to the tune of “Danny Boy” / “He Looked Beyond My Faults.” Subsequent performances on the tape include “Cleo’s Mood,” “Part Time Love,” “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do,” “Skin Tight,” “Further On Up the Road,” “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” and “Sweet Little Angel.”



The second track – a broadcast from Burgin Mathews’s radio show, The Lost Child – presents most of that tape’s music, along with live on-air commentary by Adams. The broadcast initially aired on Birmingham Mountain Radio on May 25, 2013.



Adams passed away on October 29, 2014, at the age of 86. Audio excerpts from his interviews with Mathews can be found in this website’s Frank Adams Oral History collection.