If you want to party at the All People’s Grill in Durham, N.C., you need to call ahead. Wait until Saturday, then be patient. Let the phone ring at least 10-15 times. If there’s still no answer, or just a recording, you’re out of luck. Try again next week. But if the planets are properly aligned, and a harried-sounding gentleman with a crooked croak picks up, the conversation will likely go something like this:

-Hello?
-Hi. You got any music tonight?
-Uh-huh. John gone be here.
-Right on, see you tonight.
-All right then, see you later. Spreeaad the word.
-Yes, sir. Um, ok. Will do.
-All right then. [Click.]

       I’ve called at least 10 times and still haven’t met this guy, nor is it clear who he is, or why he answers the phone. On my visits to the Grill, it’s been presided over by a core cadre of voluble ladies, all family—men seem relegated to the background—shuffling from station to station, from stove to back-room stereo to parking lot to bar and back to the kitchen. This strong African-American female presence, under the command of a “house lady,” is common to many of North Carolina’s “drink houses” and makes them unlike Mississippi Delta juke joints, which tend to be run and frequented by men. The Grill is a hybrid, a mix of three not-so-distinct traditional watering holes: the drink house, the juke joint, and the roadhouse. It’s technically not a drink house, since it’s legal, open to the public, and not residential. Historically speaking, it can’t really be classified as a juke joint, since live music only came to the Grill about five years ago (before that it was a dancing spot with just a jukebox or DJ) and is offered somewhat erratically; and the roadhouse conjures seedy—if hackneyed—images of truckers, honky-tonk angels, and, possibly, a pervasive violence entirely absent from the atypical Grill crowd. No, the Grill is something else.

       Six miles off I-85, it’s an easy spot to miss. But when it feels like opening, it opens loud. When you pull into the gravel parking lot, out on rural Guess Road, you can’t help but hear the strains of the raucous rhythm and blues roaring inside. Entering through the kitchen, which serves some of the best soul food around, from turnip greens to sweet tea, you pay your $10 cover to whoever happens to be behind the counter, who then ushers you through a plastic accordion-door. Every guest’s arrival is a dramatic one. Coming into the main room, you step onto the stage—actually just a corner of the dance floor—behind the band, moving from the fluorescent dining area into a dim, disco-ball and fairy-light-lit checkered linoleum floor roughly 15-by-15. The natural next step is the bar, a 40-foot foray through a thicket of sweaty, swaying, sloshed bodies. The beer list is handwritten in Magic Marker on poster board; everything costs three bucks. The bar itself is a shaky plywood slab covered in red contact paper, its centerpiece a homemade ashtray assemblage made of crushed cans and beer tabs.