![]() ![]() He moved to Edison Avenue, just north of Interstate 10, in 1974.Īnd that’s where he's stayed, in a building whose exterior has airbrushed portraits of Sam Cooke, Mahalia Jackson, Nat King Cole, Barry White, Marvin Gaye, Bobby Womack, Johnny Taylor, Isaac Hayes and Barbra Streisand.Īlong the way, he changed the store’s name to DJ’s. “We got married at Second Baptist Church, and I gave the pastor five of that.”įive decades, three kids, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren later, it’s worked out OK though.Īs a teenager wanting to run a business of his own, West took some business courses, then started Jerry’s Records in 1968 at 34th and Moncrief. “On the day we got married I had $10 in my pocket,” he says. He said that, considering the precarious state of his finances then, he wouldn’t have blamed Doris if she hadn’t said "I do." ![]() She was just out of high school when they married, a couple of years after he headed for Jacksonville exactly one day after graduating high school in Georgia. West turns 70 this year, a year that will also mark 50 years selling records and 50 years since he married his wife, Doris. It’s a velvet poster, not that you can tell now. For example, up on the wall is an Alice Cooper poster West hung in 1974. Let me show you where Wilson Pickett would be.” Sure enough, 15 seconds later, he pulls out some LPs: Wilson Pickett, right there. It doesn’t look like it, but there’s order to the store, West says.Ī visitor mentions a somewhat guilty pleasure: Wilson Pickett’s version of the Archies’ “Sugar Sugar.” ![]() Narrow pathways mark the more traveled areas, but there are some corners that could only reached by some intrepid trekking over stacks of records. There’s even a reel-to-reel player somewhere back in the clutter. It’s the soundtrack for the world inside DJ’s, which is some 3,200 square feet in size, just about every inch of which is packed with LPs, 45s, CDs, cassettes, DVDs and even some random eight-tracks (West sold some the previous week to a guy with an old car he's kept original).Īt DJ’s, West sells turntables and cartridges, as well, and he just got in a shipment of cassette head cleaners (cassettes are coming back, he says). on the radio, and everyone in the house went to sleep to the music.Įverywhere you went in Blackshear, it was playing.Īnd more than five decades later, soul music is still playing inside DJ’s Record Shop, at the corner of Edison and McDuff avenues - all day long, every day but Sunday. If you were home, your father put John R. If you were out and about, you found John R.’s WLAC show on your transistor radio, which you stuck in your front pocket with the antennae sticking up out of it. In tiny Blackshear, that soul music was like a message from the bigger world, and it was one you did not want to miss. Jerry “DJ” West figures the half-century he’s spent running a used record store goes back to growing up in Blackshear, Ga., where he would tune in at night as disc jockey John R., a white guy many people thought was black, spun rhythm and blues all the way from Nashville, Tenn. ![]()
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