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3/23/23
TV News from WCTV Tallahassee
By Madison Glaser
Published: Mar. 23, 2023 at 8:19 PM CDT
‘There’s nothing like it’: Bradfordville Blues Club to close after two decades under current owners
https://www.wctv.tv/2023/03/24/theres-nothing-like-it-bradfordville-blues-club-close-after-two-decades-under-current-owners/
3/21/23 - Newspaper Article (Subscription only) TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT
(Thanks to Bob Wallerius for pics of article)
3/21/23
Board of County Commissioners
Leon County, Florida
Agenda
Regular Public Meeting
Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 3:00 p.m.
Proclamation Recognizing Gary and Kim Anton, the owners Bradfordville Blues Club. (Commissioner Welch)
2/8/23
Gary's FB Post:
It's time, folks. After 21 fantastic years of running the most magical club on the planet, it's time to fully retire, visit family and friends, take in romantic sunsets and explore parts unknown. Sadly, we announce the closing of the Bradfordville Blues Club as of April 1, 2023 (no, not an April Fool's joke). Kim and I have had the privilege of Keeping the Blues Alive at this historic and truly unique juke joint. We have been rewarded with friendships and love from the folks we've met from customers, our "irregulars", musicians, bands and the community at large. Its taken a villiage to keep the club open. The Tallahassee and music communities responded with support, loyalty and financial aid when needed. We coud not have done it without you!
There are too many people to thank but there are two people, Walter Potter and Ree Case, without whom the club woud not have survived. They have been behind us since day one and to whom we are forever grateful!
We don't know yet what the future holds for the club. It's in the hands of members of the the Henry Family who purchased the property in the 1880's. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Henry Family who supported us and kept the blues alive!
We are talking with folks who have expressed an interest in preserving the club. We truly hope that the right people come along who will have the same passion for the club, the music and the rich heritage of the Henry grounds. We'll keep you posted.
To all of our supporters: We love you and thank you for allowing Kim and me to have the time of our lives. We hope to see you in February and March as we bring in some of the bands that have meant so much to us over the last two decades.
Peace and love, y'all!
Kim and Gary Anton
2/7/23
Tallahassee music
venue known for its history, blues music and fried catfish set to close
Marina Brown
Special to the TallahasseeDemocrat
After 21 years of “jammin’ and
jukin’ and lightin’ up the night” with music carried by troubadours whose songs
burst out of hardship and pain, but spill out as pure joy — the Bradfordville
Blues Club is closing its doors for the last time on April 1, according to the
owners of the beloved establishment.
Renowned as the only Florida
venue to be placed on the famous Mississippi Blues Trail with a marker
designating its historic contribution, the Bradfordville Blues Club, much like
the blues itself, could write a few lyrics about hardship over the years.
More recent troubles, and ones
that have brought owners Gary and Kim Anton to their final decision, included
Gary’s liver transplant and other serious complications, the massive fallen oak
branch that devastated the simple concrete structure that had housed the Club
since its beginning, and as a final coup, the deep destruction that COVID
wrecked across performing arts in general.
Ironically, as a parting “finger
poke,” Anton, 72, is just getting over a prolonged two weeks of COVID now.
And yet, Gary Anton and his wife
know when at last it is time to say goodbye. He is filled with gratitude for the
friends and followers who have time and again come to the club’s assistance.
He is bursting with stories and
memories of musicians who traveled through the night just to play the
authenticity of a venue that will have no replacement — and the listeners who
danced and jived and introduced their neighbors and friends to a place where
color barriers were easily crossed. The venue hosted performers from Bobby Rush
to Guitar Shorty to Bob Margolin on the corner stage.
Gary Anton took an hour on
Monday to look back with the Democrat at what drew him to the blues and the
Blues Club, and how for so many years he and Kim cared for their “unintended
nonprofit” as if it were a child.
In the beginning, it
was Dave's CC Club
Gary Anton was raised in Miami
by a lawyer father and his wife. “My dad put a little guitar in my hands when I
was 5 or 6, I think.” Like many in the '60s, the young guitarist and his
bandmate peers were enamored of the British bands playing what would later be
"exposed" as blues-inspired music.
It seemed to settle into Anton’s
pores. He even tried a semester at the Berklee School of Music thinking he
might make a career with the guitar, but instead, by then married to Kim who
was from Tallahassee, he opted, like his father, for the law. Anton attended
Florida State University as an undergraduate, and later graduated first in his
class of over 5,000 from FSU School of Law.
Setting up his own one-man
office in 1981, he practiced in civil litigation and seemed, like many a bright
young attorney set for a predictably settled life. And then one night, along
the deeply rutted trail called Moses Lane, that life would be changed.
“There was a place… it seemed
way out in the country… called Dave’s CC Club. I’d heard about it as having
good music," Anton said. "But I got lost getting there on this 'goat
trail' that led up to it. But as soon as I came upon what was just a concrete
“bunker,” and heard what was happening inside…it was like Nirvana for me.
Inside, there were only three people — Dave and Elizabeth Claytor, the owners
of the Club, and a guitar player.”
They were Black and apparently
waiting for what would normally be an all-white audience to arrive. During
those early days and even afterward, Anton says it was always a white audience
that came to see Black musicians.
“Muddy Waters said that 'Blues
is like being Black twice'…Black people don’t need to go hear about their
troubles all over,” Gary Anton said.
Property part of Black
family heritage
The property where the club sits
off Bradfordville Road was part of a 200-plus acre tract bought by the African
American Henry family in the 1880s. It is still in the hands of many of the
family to this day. In the 1930s, Alan Henry and his sister, Inez Haynes, had
put up a small store on a part of the land which was also used as community
center for a recreational baseball team where the CC Saints played every week.
“People would sell vegetables
and other wares, and apparently come to play music too,” Gary Anton said.
Eventually, Dave Claytor began
to run the little concrete building as a music venue, and there are stories
that the likes of B.B. King, Ray Charles, and Chuck Berry would come over to
the CC Club after their gigs at the Red Bird and Two Step in Frenchtown and
stay till the sun was on the rise at Dave’s CC Club.
The Claytors moved away in 2001
and by 2002 Gary Anton, at that time still a full-time attorney, and his wife
decided that after having spent nearly every weekend at the CC Club, tending
bar when needed, steeping themselves in the music that was now essential to
their lives, they would take over the enterprise.
'Personal
relationships' and historic designation
They rechristened it the
Bradfordville Blues Club and became the bookers, the business executives, the
sound engineers, the sweepers, stockers, and repairmen for the aging venue. And
it was sweet. Except for the never-ending efforts to pay the bills, the Antons
were having the times of their lives.
“It’s those personal
relationships made through the years that we’ll miss most,” says Anton. He
recounts the storied artists who’ve come to be friends: Mac Arnold, Guitar
Shorty, John Primer, Joey Gilmore, Bobby Rush… who, at 88 “sounds just like
you’re sittin’ on the front porch with him telling you stories of the old
days…”
You almost get the feeling that
in his soul, Gary Anton has lived there as well.
One of the things he is most
proud of is the BBC’s designation in 2010 as the only Florida venue to be
placed on the famous Mississippi Blues Trail with a marker designating its
historic contribution to the Blues. “People come from all over the country and
abroad to hear us because of that award,” Anton said.
Fried catfish and acts
of kindness
They might also come to have a
bite of Miss Ernestine (Fryson’s) red velvet cake and fried catfish. As much a
part of the nighttime magic as the music, the taste of 78-year-old Ernestine’s
fried treats between sets, and the bonfire that has brightened the darkness
beneath the oaks for over 15 years, will live in regulars’ hearts.
And so why now? Why not stay in
service to the place that has held them for so long?
“You know, over all these years,
we have never taken a salary. We haven’t made a dime. The opposite. Any little
time there was a profit, we poured it back into repairs or a great booking.
We’ve made use of GoFundMe campaigns when huge repairs were needed. And most of
all we’ve been the recipients of the tremendous kindnesses of people who love
the club.
Anton says that when he was
hospitalized, regulars took over the running of the BBC and when the oak limb
destroyed the roof, contractor Wayne Tate volunteered all of the repairs
without pay. And throughout the years one woman, who wishes to remain
anonymous, has supported the Club with monthly gifts now totaling “nearly
$100,000.” “There just aren’t any words for that kind of kindness,” he says.
Aging out: Johnnie
Marshall finale
But Anton is realistic too. Time
moves on, and many of the changes time has wrought were not helpful to filling
seats on a country lane in north Tallahassee. “Friday night football was a big
drain,” says Anton. “The Downtown Get Downs, the recession some years ago, the
tree in 2018, and the pandemic that shut us down for a full year all took their
toll. And maybe too, it’s time passing by in general.”
He wonders if the demise of many
of the Blues Chitlin’ Circuit stars and the aging of the audiences who
appreciated them has something to do with the decline in audiences he’s seen in
the last years.
But the doors of the Blues Club
aren’t locked yet. In a kind of grand curtain call, for the next eight weekends
through April 1, a parade of famed blues legends will make their final
appearances on the tiny corner stage, including Bill "Sauce Boss"
Wharton this weekend.
Some may take home their
circular portraits that adorn the walls and act as cocktail tables, paintings
made to honor a history that is slowly slipping from the scene. Others will
take away memories never to be revived.
“It seems fitting,” Anton said,
“the Johnnie Marshall Band who were the first to play the Blues Club, will now
be the last.”
He smiles, weary from COVID, yet
sounding hopeful in a way perhaps Anton hasn’t in many years.
“After all these years, Kim and
I hope to travel… see our family… live a little differently than we have after
all these years. We used to canoe and kayak… we once were ‘outdoor’ people.
Now, maybe there will be time left to get some of that back,” Anton said.
But Gary and Kim and Miss
Ernestine will still be at the Bradfordville Blues Club through April 1,
waiting to welcome you at the door, seat you in a great spot, and nod along
with you to some of the best music — bluesy or otherwise— this side of heaven.
And of course, if there is
anyone out there who’d like a little project — an historical gem needing a
little polishing, Gary Anton might just take a meeting.
Like going back in
time
On
a deeply rutted road in the North Florida woods, the moon shines through a
tangled crochet of oaks dripping with Spanish moss. You might think you've
stepped back in time.
Tallahassee
is only minutes away, but here there’s the sensation its urban pulse is far
behind. Here, you feel you’ve entered an era when speakeasies, juke joints and
honky-tonks could be found along the out-of-the-way rural roads of South
Georgia and Florida's northern line.
In
a kind of time travel, you bump off Sam's Lane and onto Moses' Lane. You're not
far now. The Bradfordville Blues Club – a pulsing, literally throbbing holdover
from the days when bluesmen traveled the "chitlin' circuit" – is just
through the trees.
- Marina Brown, from a story a
decade ago
