It takes some real imagination to conjure up what Robert’s honky tonk on Broadway looked and felt like in the early 1990s when JesseLee Jones, newly minted American citizen, got his first look at the place.
It was between the Wagon Burner and the Adult World porn shop. Vagrants, oddball buskers, and prostitutes milled around. The nearly abandoned Ryman Auditorium, right out back, was about to undergo renovations, but it wasn’t open yet. Robert Moore, owner of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge and then the ramshackle boot and hat store three doors down that would bear his name, was known as the street’s keeper of the peace. The only tourists who came around were the brave ones looking for something authentic and edgy.
Jones, who has been here nearly every day in the three decades since, remembers. “There were booths here, like it was like a Waffle House, but there were boots all the way down to the back, and shirts and hats and belt buckles,” he says in an on-location interview for Episode 297 of The String. He points. “There was a little grill over there. This guy was smoking a cigarette and cooking with cigarette ashes dropping onto the grill.” Two women, apparently sex workers, were arguing about something, while Gary Bennett, future member of BR549, was singing “Magnolia Wind” as best he could until he couldn’t take the racket. “All of a sudden he gets on a microphone and is like, ‘SHUT THE F*** UP. I'm trying to work here!” And Jones, a devout Christian immigrant from Brazil, by way of ten years in the mid-American town of Peoria, IL, took it all in.
“I felt like, wow, this is so wrong man, it's right. And I wanted to be a part of it.”
Had Jones come to town and pursued the usual strategy of playing open mics and knocking on song publishers’ doors, the odds would have been against him. Instead, he committed himself to a place, one whose stock was about to rise. And today, as the 25-year proprietor of Robert’s Western World, that place has given him a reach and a life mission most country singers only dream of.
Jones started at Robert’s with odd jobs, but Moore liked Jones’s voice, so when he wasn’t cleaning up he was often up on stage, honing his chops singing classic country music. Jones was around when Greg Garing and Paul Burch and others began carving out space for traditional country music on the strip and when Bennett joined forces with fellow Broadway singer Chuck Mead and put together BR549. It was like living in modern Nashville's book of Genesis.
“Nobody would come downtown then, and then all of a sudden, you could come to Robert’s, and this place would be packed with college students,” Jones says. “You had lawyers, you had doctors, you had a few homeless guys. And these beautiful girls are dancing on a dance floor with these, you know, toothless guys, and it was like, what is happening? So it really opened up my heart, my mind, to hillbilly music.”
In truth, that awakening took place years before, when Jones was growing up in rough circumstances in the gigantic city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. And in this interview, Jones shares intimate and difficult memories of feeling estranged and hungry for a bigger, better life. He heard a lot of varied music, he says, in multiple languages. But it was through church (the other force that saved his life he says), that he found his way to a guitar and a pastor who urged him to sing at a talent show. Somebody taught him John Denver’s “Country Roads.” An uncle exposed him to jazz and classical music. And JesseLee was hooked.
“My mom was the one who showed me an Elvis record, the one just before he died,” Jones says. “Then this friend gave me this cassette, and there was Waylon (Jennings), and there was Freddy Fender and so many others. And Hank Williams, of all things. I knew I loved it. I loved the sound.”
No summary can adequately capture what came next - the community that urged him to move to America, the cop who tells him he needs to sing, the guy who gave him a miracle visa, the family that took him in when he was penniless, and so much more. Like the moment he was dubbed the Brazilian Hillbilly by an undetermined member of BR549, lending him a band name that’s alive and well today - Brazilbilly - which recently made its debut on the Grand Ole Opry. Jones’s own version of the story is rich and dramatic and unlike any musical life I’ve ever documented on the show.
Robert Moore’s trust let Jones buy Robert’s Western World in 1999, and he’s taken care ever since that the place be nothing but a honky tonk. No televisions, he says. No cover charge. A grill with nobody smoking anywhere nearby. And on stage, no Luke Bryan or Aerosmith covers. Just blue yodels, swinging fiddles, yearning steel guitars, and great songs.
“This is an extension of my soul. This is an extension of my heart,” Jones says. “When you talk about blood sweat and tears, for real. Yeah, plenty of it right here - smashing my fingers, cutting myself. Because for a very long time, I was, you know, janitor. I worked the door. I cooked. I served. I was a musician.” He’s even set up, for the past 18 years, a church service every week called Sunday Morning Coming Down, in case you didn’t think anything holy happens on Lower Broadway. “I love what we've created. I love what this place is about.”
