Ask CITYVIEW

I am 100% certain I attended a Freddie King concert in the summer of 1976 in a small bar near Drake University. Can any CITYVIEW reader confirm King’s 1976 Des Moines appearance?

We are not sure if our readers can confirm it, but we sent ourselves down the rabbit hole looking for evidence of the late blues guitarist’s Des Moines appearance. King notably played at the Iowa State Fairgrounds on June 17, 1972, alongside the Leon Russell Group and J.J. Cale. But that is neither 1976 nor near Drake University. 

Concertarchives.org shows King was playing concerts in March at Huntington Beach, California, and the next concert he played was in Mansfield Center, Connecticut, in July. So, it would make sense that King was traveling through the middle of the country during the summer to get from one side to the other. 

We then went to newspapers.com, another archive, and searched King’s name alongside Des Moines during the summer months of 1976. It pulled up an advertisement placed in The Des Moines Register on May 28, 1976, for a concert at Jolly’s Place on 32nd Street and Forest Avenue, placing it squarely in Dogtown. Jolly’s closed sometime in the 1970s, shortly thereafter, and, potentially, for good reason, as Register writer Robert Kolarik wrote when talking about the opening of its replacement, the Copper Dollar:

“Whenever the conversation turned to ‘What’s your favorite bar?’ a stated preference for Jolly’s was sure to provoke shocked looks and cries of ‘You go there?’ Popular wisdom said that by going into Jolly’s, you took your life in your hands.”

We also asked Scott Allen from the Central Iowa Blues Society if he knew of any King performances in Des Moines. Our original hunch was that he played at So’s Your Mother, a well-known music venue, also in the Drake Area, which was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Allen says he recalls King playing there as well. We could not find any evidence to corroborate the claims, but it would make sense that if King stopped to play a night at Jolly’s, he likely made an appearance at So’s Your Mother as well. If you have any record of the concert, feel free to share it with us at editor@dmcityview.com. n