Bars I’ve loved

Jive in dives and other moments I mostly remember

World Boogie Blues Bar, 2026
Analog collage

Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive
I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive
— “All I Want,” Joni Mitchell

… High on Rose, in Lexington, Kentucky, where my cousin and I wandered upstairs one night to discover a band called Shoeless Joe, and I drunkenly challenged them to play a John Prine song I didn’t know, and the singer busted out “He Was in Heaven Before He Died.” … The Last National Banque, in my hometown of Maysville, Kentucky, where on April 2, 1983, drinking with my brother, I left at halftime of the Louisville-Houston NCAA Tournament semifinal game to run the few blocks up to St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, to say confession, because I promised my mother I would, Bless me father, for I have imbibed (but at least I’ve kept the fifth commandment), and was back (almost) in time for the second-half tip. … The White Rose in York, Pennsylvania, into which a few of us from the newspaper walked one Saturday night to the sound of Old Tommy the bartender, not to be confused with Young Tommy the owner, singing, “I’m a rambler and a gambler,” and Barb finishing the line, “and a long way from home.” And so we’d found the HQ for what we would call the York Area Press Club. … O’Neills, on Pearse Street, in Dublin, which became our local that week of our trip (celebrating our 30th anniversary, with our son in tow), and the last stop on that one pub crawl after which, having gotten away from us down the sidewalk and doubled over in laughter at something known only to her, we declared Barb to be, in that brief moment, the drunkest person in all of Ireland, which was to say the drunkest person in all the world. Then off to the greyhound races at Shelbourne Park …

Have a round and remember
Things we did that weren’t so tender
— “Let the Train Blow the Whistle,” Johnny Cash