Red Paden, the self-proclaimed “king of the juke racks,” spent four decades as the owner of Red's, a low-key music venue in downtown Clarksdale, Mississippi, and one of the last places in the United States offering authentic music. Delta blues in his natural environment, he died on December 30 at age 67.
His son, Orlando, said the death, at a hospital in Jackson, Mississippi, was due to complications from heart surgery.
Music venues, once common throughout the Deep South, were the clay from which blues music emerged, a vast network of shacks, old stores, and converted houses where traveling musicians played on a nightly basis. of the ticket price and then moved on to the next concert.
Red's is the quintessential example: low-ceilinged and the size of a large garage, decorated with vintage music posters and illuminated with neon signs and string light bulbs (red, of course).
At Red's there is no stage, just a worn carpet, enough for a singer, a guitarist and maybe a drummer. One cooler contains beer, and when he felt like it, Mr. Paden (pronounced PAY-den) would fire up the smoker on the sidewalk and cook up a pile of ribs. Informality is key.
“I grew up listening to the blues and I opened that place to have a place to go and play,” he told Living Blues magazine in 2017. “People come, that's my living room. Relax and enjoy it.”
Paden opened Red's in the early 1980s, taking over an abandoned music store called LaVene's that was once popular with Delta musicians. Among them was Ike Turner, a Clarksdale native who used instruments from the store on “Rocket 88,” a 1951 hit with his band Kings of Rhythm that is widely considered the first rock 'n' roll recording.
Over the years, Red's became an institution celebrated for its authenticity, right down to its deep-voiced owner. Virtually every Mississippi blues artist played at Red's, including Robert (Wolfman) Belfour, James (T-Model) Ford, Wesley (Junebug) Jefferson and James (Super Chikan) Johnson.
Celebrities also attended: Actor Morgan Freeman, who grew up in nearby Charleston and later founded his own club, Ground Zero, in Clarksdale, was a regular. Chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain filmed part of an episode of his show “Parts Unknown” at Red's.
“It was like walking into a history book,” said Roger Stolle, a local blues preservationist, in a telephone interview. “It was like going back in time.”
Juke venues began to decline in the 1990s, in part because Mississippi began allowing casinos that offered live music for free, said Shelley Ritter, director of the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale. Today, Stolle estimates that Red's may be one of the few remaining in the Deep South, kept alive largely by Paden's singular passion.
“Red was different from everyone else,” Stolle said. “He was willing to take the hit to move forward.”
Cornelius Orlando Paden was born on November 27, 1956 in Alligator, a crossroads southwest of Clarksdale. His parents, John and Grace (Scott) Paden, were farmers. People called him Rojo since he was little, for reasons he never explained.
He grew up in Clarksdale and studied special education at Jackson State University, graduating in 1979. As a teenager, he had worked intermittently for two of his uncles, who owned a nearby music venue, and despite his training as a teacher, he soon followed his example.
For a time he owned two other venues in and around Clarksdale: the Tin Top, another music venue around the corner from Red's, and Redwine's, a dance hall beyond the city limits where, in On a particularly lively night, the crowd at Red's might head after closing time.
He married Lisa Foster in 1990. She and their son Orlando survive him, as do their two daughters, Marquita Paden and Yushumia Caldwell; five grandchildren; her sisters, Fannie Wilson and Vinorah Cotton; and her brothers, Herman and Sherman.
As Red's veterans died, abandoned the nightlife or spent more time in the casinos, they were replaced by a growing flow of tourists, mostly white and from as far away as Europe and Australia. Mr. Paden didn't mind (a crowd is a crowd), although he sometimes seemed to miss the rowdier old days.
“There used to be a lot of cutting and shooting,” he told Stolle in his book “Mississippi Juke Joint Confidential: House Parties, Hustlers & the Blues Life” (2019). “Now it's like going to church.”
In 2018, he founded Red's Old-Timer's Blues Festival, held every Labor Day weekend. The criteria to participate in the event were vague: you had to be over 60 years old, have at least a passing relationship with Mississippi and, most importantly, be in good standing with Mr. Paden. “Cadillac” John Nolden, a 91-year-old harmonica player, was among its first headliners.
The festival, Paden said, was aimed both at helping older blues musicians and inspiring younger ones.
“What I decided to do was offer them a festival, let them earn a little money, show them how good life can be in old age,” he said in a 2018 video interview posted on Facebook. “And that would give everyone an incentive to grow.”
Orlando Paden, a Mississippi state representative, said his father was already planning the next festival when he died, and that he and other organizers would move forward without him, and even expand it. They plan to host additional events and also introduce a barbecue competition.
“It's going to be the biggest one yet,” Paden said. “That's what my dad would have wanted.”
