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<\/p>\nArticle by Ricardo Montero-Hernandez, December 16, 2016
\nPictures by Ricardo Montero-Hernandez<\/p>\n
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Samuel Hargress Jr. stands by the door of his jazz bar every night of the week. His Paris Blues<\/a> provides an old school, Harlem ambience of\u00a0a time before gentrification, and he greets every customer as a new neighbor.<\/p>\n Wearing dark sunglasses, a godfather hat and, on some occasions, a matching zuit\u00a0suit,\u00a0he is a figure\u00a0straight out of Roman Polanski\u2019s CHINATOWN<\/a>,\u00a0and with the old blues playing and the 1970s decorum, Paris Blue\u2019 is truly a time capsule.<\/p>\n You\u2019d think that a 80-year-old-bar owner would be sapped by the years of long hours keeping a juke joint prosperous but Hargress said that he has never drank or smoked, and his youthful energy and easy going nature\u00a0are evident. He stands tall, and, besides a few wrinkles and wisps of white hair, no noticeable signs of time\u00a0slowing him down is evident.<\/p>\n He was born in Demopolis, Alabama, in 1936, during the time of the Jim Crow Laws<\/a>, and his childhood revolved around ways to succeed under oppressive conditions. \u201cYou were on your own,” he said. Jim Crow Laws “helped us some because we knew how they worked. If you from Alabama from my time, you know how to use a saw, a hammer and a screwdriver because you’d have to do everything yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI learned how to do all the different things you need to do to survive on your own,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n His family owned \u201cjuke joints\u201d around the state. He learned the business and all he had to do when the time came was to get a bar.\u00a0\u00a0He knew the business and all he had to do was get a bar. His plans stalled, however, when he was drafted in the Army. In 1959, after bootcamp, he became an Army\u00a0MP and worked in France and Germany, and it was during his time in Paris that he fell in love with francophone culture.\u00a0Hargress said that African-American musicians, mainly jazz and blues players, traveled to Paris where they were treated as equals, and the music overcame lingual, cultural and racial barriers.<\/p>\n After his discharge from the Army, he returned to Alabama during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement and marched with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. He witnessed the violence that civil rights leaders had to survive in their quest for basic human liberties.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/1000-IMG_0037.jpg\")
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