The jukebox at Earnestine & Hazel's, an old dive bar in downtown Memphis, plays records nobody punched in, cueing up songs that answer the room. The owner who ran it for two decades was found dead in the apartment above the bar in 2013, and the staff say he never quite left.
The jukebox at Earnestine & Hazel's plays records nobody chose. It sits along the wall across from the bar in this old dive in downtown Memphis, and staff and reporters describe it cueing up songs that answer the room. Two bartenders were talking about James Brown the day he died, and it blared "I Feel Good." A paranormal investigator got going about exorcisms, and it played "Sympathy for the Devil." Someone threw a divorce party, and out came Tammy Wynette's "D-I-V-O-R-C-E." When a Boston Globe reporter asked the cook in 2022 how the thing worked, the answer was flat: "You punch in the numbers and it plays whatever it wants."
The building at 531 South Main has lived a dozen lives. It was a church, then a Pantaze drugstore run by Abe Plough, the druggist who later invented Coppertone. Plough handed the place to two beauticians, Earnestine Mitchell and Hazel Jones, who ran it as a café with rooms upstairs. Musicians walked over from the nearby Club Paradise after their sets to eat and hang around: B.B. King, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner.
Russell George reopened it as the dive bar it is today on St. Patrick's Day, 1993, and ran it for two decades. He lived in the apartment above. On September 9, 2013, he was found dead up there, an apparent self-inflicted gunshot.
Since then, the people who tend bar say he never quite left. A presence brushing past. A tall figure caught in the mirrors behind the bar. Karen Brownlee, who poured drinks there for years, heard a piano playing upstairs when she was alone in the building, and once, at the jukebox, felt something touch her. That was the only time it scared her.
She wasn't the only one to leave with a story. A visitor named Mark climbed to the second floor and heard a woman's voice say "Hey!" right beside him. "Clear and loud," he said, "as if she were right next to me." Brownlee had her own visitor. After her son died, she asked the bar for a sign, and told of an elderly woman appearing to her afterward in a sterling-silver bird necklace. She believed it was Mrs. Earnestine herself.
The upstairs rooms have always carried the darker stories: the brothel years, the women said to have died in them, none of it in any record. So in July 2019, when a repair crew opened a wall and found bones sealed inside it, it looked for a moment like the building had finally given one of those stories up. The police came out. The bones were a cow's.
