Juggy Murray Jones – Inside America

6th October 2021 · 1970s, 1976, Disco, Funk, Music

Here’s another funky slice of disco from the vaults by the splendidly named Juggy Murray Jones. It sneaked into the Top 40 and was a dancefloor staple across Britain in 1976.

You’d hear it at nightspots like Crackers in Wardour Street, Flicks in Dartford, The California Ballroom (aka “The Cali”) in Dunstable, The Goldmine in Canvey and Ilford’s Lacy Lady.

Juggy Murray (I don’t know where the Jones came from) never became a major star in his own right – this was his only hit of any kind – but his contribution to music is considerable.

Long before this, back in the 1950s, he started one of the first black-owned labels. He signed Ike & Tina Turner, launching them on the road to success, and gave a guitarist called Jimi Hendrix his first record deal.

A Southern boy by birth, Juggy was raised in Hell’s Kitchen in NYC, and was working in real estate in Harlem when he founded Sue Records in 1957 with Bobby Robinson.

Their initial ambition stretched no further than selling R&B music to the city’s African-American community, but they had a hit single in their first year – Itchy Twitchy Feeling by Bobby Hendricks – and never looked back after paying Ike & Tina Turner a $25,000 advance for a four-year contract.

The duo were an instant success, their string of hits including A Fool In Love, Poor Fool, It’s Gonna Work Out Fine and I Idolize You, though they fell out with Juggy and ended up in court in 1962 in a contractual dispute about upaid royalties.

Undeterred, he paid a similar sum to buy out Barbara George’s contract, and released more hits throughout the Sixties, among them Mockingbird by brother-and-sister duo Inez & Charlie Foxx and She Blew A Good Thing by The Poets.

In 1965 he signed an unknown guitarist called Jimi Hendrix to an exclusive two-year deal with Sue Records but never released a note of his music.

By the 1970s he was living in California, where he recorded a few singles himself, including this one, under the name Juggy Jones, though he spent most of his career producing and promoting other artists.

Oh and about that nickname: it comes from his near-blind grandfather who used to ask the young lad to fill his favourite jug with liquor.