Chris Thomas King is, bluntly, perplexing. He is a talented guitarist and actor, but the his rhetoric and results rarely match up. He has worked in recent years to put forward the notion of 21st Century blues as a merger of blues and hip-hop, but none of his recent releases document that sound. The closest is 21-CB-Boyz, a 2004 album by Kipori Woods and Myself. His album from 2004, Why My Guitar Screams & Moans is a funky, electric guitar-based album. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s hard to feel like he’s committed to his concept based on that evidence.

King recently re-released Red Mud Sessions, which was originally released in 1998 on Black Top Records. The album helped bring King to the attention of the Coen Brothers, who eventually cast him in the role of Tommy Johnson in O Brother Where Art Thou? It presents King at his most assured and in the incarnation — as an acoustic Delta bluesman — people have to come to want from him. It is also, he has said in interviews, him acting, and that Tommy Johnson was just a role. Since the label he owns is reissuing Red Mud Sessions, it doesn’t sound like it’s a role he’s running from as much as he purports.
King reinforces this supposed misapprehension as to who he musically is in Juke Joint: You Can Never Go Home Again. The DVD claims to be a documentary by King on the last days of Tabby’s Blues Box, the Baton Rouge blues club owned by his father, Tabby Thomas. Really, though, King performing solo, including two songs from Red Mud Sessions, dominates the hour-long film. Treating Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” as a blues is the sort of smart touch that gives hope King will live up to his rhetoric.

That aside, Juke Joint a bit of a mess. King never develops a coherent narrative, nor does he give viewers any sense of the bar itself, whether as a physical space or a neighborhood center. Unless the stage at the Blues Box normally has trees of candles on it, he doesn’t even let viewers know what the stage looks like. He is outraged that Thomas’ bar is being torn down to make way for an overpass, but he never asks his father what he thinks, nor does his father ever take the stage. In fact, there are few shots in the movie that don’t focus on King. You’d think there’s a good story to tell about Tabby’s Blues Box, and you’d think Chris Thomas King would be a good person to tell it. Juke Joint, though, suggests neither assumption is true.