It’s 11 o’clock on a Friday night at Lee’s Unleaded Blues, an oasis of light and music on a desolate strip of South Chicago Avenue near the South Shore neighborhood. The featured band, Johnny Drummer & the Starlighters, has been onstage for more than an hour, but Drummer has sung only one or two songs. A singer and harmonica player called the Arkansas Belly Roller took the microphone shortly after the set began; he stormed through primal re-creations of “Driving Wheel” and “Shake, Rattle & Roll,” stopping occasionally in the middle of a verse to lift his shirt and perform a couple of his trademark midriff undulations.
Ray and Leola “Lee” Grey purchased the bar, then called Harper’s Point, in 1983. But Ray had been managing taverns since 1954, when he took over the Go-Go Sox Club, on 35th across from Comiskey Park. In those days it was almost unheard-of for a black man to run a bar in Bridgeport, but Grey maintains that with his gift for making connections he was able to pull it off without any problems. “Of course I was aware of it,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to be caught [on the streets] in Bridgeport after nine o’clock at night. But I was on the inside; I knew Grace Comiskey personally. It didn’t bother me. I did a good white trade there. During the time when the Cardinals played there, football, and when the White Sox was playing good, I made money. So it didn’t really affect me.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“She was a hell of a woman, that Queen Bee,” he says fondly. “She would drink anything–if you drinkin’ Scotch, she’d drink Scotch with you; if you drinkin’ bourbon, she’ll drink bourbon with you. If I’m drinkin’ gin, she’ll drink gin with me. She drank cowboy-style! But she was a good businesswoman.”
In December 1974, at the age of 34, Queen Bee suffered a fatal stroke at her club. Her daughter Regina Collins took over for a while, but after a few years she leased the room to a man named Roosevelt Harper. He kept the tavern open as Harper’s Point, but didn’t book any bands. Meanwhile, Grey had moved on. In December 1969 he’d met soft-spoken young Leola Dawson, who’d come north to Chicago from Mississippi the previous year.
“This was a brand-new game for her–she’s a country girl,” says Ray. “She didn’t know one brand of liquor from the other. But I taught her, and I taught her well enough that this place didn’t have to have my presence. I’ve been in the game a long time; I’d rather put her out front. Fellow tell me, ‘Ray, you shouldn’t tell your wife all these things. What if she get rid of you?’ I said, ‘Hell, she ain’t that strong.’” They both laugh.
“I got a chance to get out while I’m on top of the game,” Ray says. “I’m still relatively healthy. You wouldn’t believe I only have one lung, much as I talk. But I only have one lung–I had lung cancer. I had colon cancer, I had prostate cancer. And I had a stroke, at the Imperial Palace in Vegas. Went all the way to Vegas and had a stroke. But I’m in relatively good health. I’m 74, and these few years that I have left, I want to enjoy myself. Get out on top of your game, you know? Get out on top of your game.”
Davis insists that he knows his way around the entertainment business. Over the years he’s put on various shows and benefits for charity, and he says that when he and his family lived in Beverly he coordinated “the biggest block party over there” on an annual basis. In January he organized a retirement party for Lee, which featured continuous live entertainment and drew more than 500 people to Mr. G’s Supper Club at 87th and Ashland.
