Arts & Culture

Is The Twisted Tail Philadelphia's Last Dedicated Blues Room?

I went looking for another dedicated blues club in Philadelphia to prove myself wrong about the Twisted Tail, and here is what I found.

By Harry Hayman 8 min read
Is The Twisted Tail Philadelphia's Last Dedicated Blues Room?

September’s calendar from The Twisted Tail was still open on my laptop when the question actually landed, the kind that sits behind your ribs instead of passing through polite conversation. I was scrolling the lineup for the room at 509 South 2nd Street, the one with the stage tucked upstairs and the shuffleboard table against the back wall, and I found myself asking something I could not shake. Is this genuinely the last real, dedicated blues room left in Philadelphia? Not a night here, a set there, a jazz club that occasionally leans blue. An actual room built around the blues, running it night after night. I wanted to be wrong about that. I still do. So before I said another word about the club on Second Street, I went and checked every room I could find.

A Juke Room on the Block Where Philadelphia’s Markets Began

The Twisted Tail sits on South 2nd Street between South and Lombard, in the stretch of Society Hill that everyone in this city still calls Headhouse Square, a name that traces back to the New Market that opened on that block in 1745 and to the brick firehouse the neighborhood built to watch over it. I have walked past that firehouse more times than I can count on my way to a bourbon flight and a plate off the charcoal grill, and I never fully registered what I was walking past until I sat down to write this. According to a local writeup of the room itself, the building the Twisted Tail occupies has operated as a tavern since 1799, which means people have been drinking and listening to music on that exact block since George Washington was still alive. Upstairs, past the dining room, the space opens into what the club calls its Juke Joint, a room with its own bar, a proper stage, and enough open floor that nobody has to choose between watching the band and dancing to it. The whole building brands itself, on its own site, around one line: listen to the blues. That is not a marketing flourish tacked onto a bourbon bar. It is the stated reason the room exists.

Six Nights a Week, and a Sunday That Never Charges a Cover

Live blues runs at the Twisted Tail six nights a week according to the venue’s own account, which is not a claim I take at face value from anybody anymore, so I read the September sheet the way I would read a set of numbers on a policy memo. The club’s own calendar named David Falcone up top, then a night pairing Mikey Junior with Filthy Rich, the Rich MacPherson led outfit that has spent decades on stages across the tri state blues circuit. Judd Nielsen followed, a Hammond organ player whose own biography traces back to watching Dr. Lonnie Smith at Smoke as a teenager and forward through stints with Trombone Shorty’s band and residencies at Bob and Barbara’s Lounge. Jackson Taylor Lee and Benjamin Byrd filled two more dates, and the Mikey Junior Band closed out a second night of its own. Randy Lippincott, a bassist whose record includes a Grammy nomination for his work backing Luther Guitar Junior Johnson, rounded out the sheet before Sunday arrived. Every Sunday from five to nine, the Juke Joint turns the stage over to whoever shows up with an instrument, an open blues jam run under the Mikey Junior name, no cover charged and no audition required. I have stood in that room on a Sunday and watched a teenager trade choruses with a man who has been playing the same twelve bars since before I was born. Wednesdays carry no cover either, and that single detail turned out to matter more than I expected once I did the arithmetic later in this piece.

Why Harry Hayman Keeps Asking This Question

So I went looking for the room that would prove me wrong, because I meant it when I said I wanted to be. Philadelphia has a Blues Society, a real nonprofit that calls itself the blues authority in the region, and it has a home venue. That home venue, Jamey’s House of Music, presents blues several nights a week and hosts the society’s own programming under its roof. I got excited reading through its calendar until I checked the address: 32 South Lansdowne Avenue, Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, a borough in Delaware County that sits close enough to West Philadelphia that you could walk it, and far enough that it is legally and municipally a different town. A few miles further out, in Upper Darby, another room called Fedora Blues Club has run blues and jazz programming out of a Market Street storefront since 2015. Both rooms are real, both matter to the regional scene, and neither one sits inside the boundary that separates a Philadelphia blues club from a blues club near Philadelphia. Inside the city itself, the closest thing I found was Black Squirrel Club, a converted 1890s steam plant in Fishtown that runs a long standing Monday night jam and books an eclectic calendar that swings from bluegrass to Irish folk. Its own identity, and the identity the city’s music press gives it, is a jazz room first. Blues turns up there. It does not run the place.

The Room That Used to Answer This For Me

Twenty five years is not a footnote in a city this old, and Warmdaddy’s ran for exactly that long, opening in 1995 near Front and Market and later moving to a room on Columbus Boulevard, before the pandemic closed its doors in August of 2020. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia calls Warmdaddy’s the city’s most prominent blues focused venue of the late twentieth and early twenty first century, which is not a title handed out loosely, and it is the closest thing to an official answer to my own question that this city has ever kept on the record. Robert and Benjamin Bynum, the brothers who ran it, promised the closure was temporary, and by that November they had reopened in Spring Garden on Mount Vernon Street, next door to South Jazz Kitchen, still serving rhythm and blues alongside the soul food. Public listings for that Spring Garden address now show it closed as well. The Bynum family’s other room, Zanzibar Blue, deserves an honest correction here since it gets folded into Warmdaddy’s story often enough. It was a jazz club, not a blues room, and it closed in 2007 when the family chose not to renew its lease at the Bellevue. I bring it up only because it shows the same family building rooms and losing them for a generation, in two different genres, in the same city. And here is the detail that actually got under my skin while I was researching this piece. Randy Lippincott, the same bassist on my own September sheet at the Twisted Tail, spent years fronting a band at Warmdaddy’s before that room disappeared. The musicians did not go anywhere. The room did.

Who Pays the Band When Nobody Pays a Cover

Here is where the numbers start explaining what a Wednesday actually costs somebody at 509 South 2nd Street. The National Independent Venue Association’s own State of Live research found that sixty four percent of independent stages nationwide were not profitable in 2024, a year in which the same sector still generated more than one hundred fifty three billion dollars in economic output and supported over nine hundred thousand jobs across the country. Pennsylvania’s own numbers run the same direction. In the Harrisburg market alone, only twelve percent of independent stages reported turning a profit that year. A small room in Delaware, the 443 Social Club, published its own books rather than talk in generalities, and the arithmetic is blunt. On one show, the club paid out one hundred eighteen percent of that day’s sales between the band and the sound technician. On a separate night with no cover charge and roughly twenty people in the room, a duo still walked away with fifty six percent of the bar’s gross. None of that money touches rent, insurance, or payroll. It is the band, first, out of whatever the door and the bar take in that night. That is what a Wednesday with no cover at the Twisted Tail actually is. Somebody, and on Wednesdays that somebody has a name and a mortgage, reaches into the register at closing and makes up the difference between what came in and what a working blues musician is owed for four sets. I am not writing any of this to guilt anybody into a bar tab. I looked up the real math behind a line I almost wrote as a throwaway, and the math turned out worse than the line. So I will be at the Twisted Tail in September, on a night that has not sold out and never will, ordering the second bourbon slower than the first, listening to somebody bend a string until it hurts, and if there is a genuine dedicated blues room inside this city that I somehow missed, I would still like to hear about it. I will be at the bar either way.

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