Word: shebeens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...left his $46.80-a-week Kensington Palace post after 25 days because of the bohemian and meddlesome ways of Master Tony Armstrong-Jones, wrote some embarrassing memoirs and migrated to Florida as $300-a-week butler-host of the Dania Jai-Alai Palace; and May Groom, 50, grandmotherly shebeen queen of a London pub; he for the first time, she for the second; in London...
...Africans seem to get all the liquor they want. The more opulent buy cheap South African brandy for $3 to $4 a bottle from white bootleggers who pick it up at $1.68 in the whites-only stores. The rest drink their troubles away at the illicit drinking parlors of "shebeen queens." wealthy black matrons who serve a throat-scalding, home-distilled brew made by boiling together potato peelings, berries and sometimes a dash of methylated spirits...
...NATION GASPS AT WIDE CONCESSIONS, headlined the Rand Daily Mail, and the head of the temperance movement cried, "I can see only evil arising from this measure . . . Africans don't drink to enjoy it . . . they drink to get drunk." Angriest of all were the shebeen queens, whose brimming vats of fermenting rotgut would become unsalable when their thirsty black customers finally could walk around the corner and buy the real stuff...
With raw flair, swivel-hipped sex, lurid color and fundamental rhythms. King Kong has clapped a rough hand on English shoulders to lead its new audience through the shebeens (speakeasies) and back alleys around black Johannesburg. Great gum-booted miners dance with precision, township spivs glitter with menace as they re-enact a primeval war dance; shebeen Delilahs strut their stuff in the sinuous dance of the patha patha (touch, touch). Racy, swinging rhythms interweave tribal chants, European liturgical music and 1925 Dixieland stomps. Such certified-hit solos as The Earth Turns Over alternate with pennywhistle blues and a road...