Book Excerpt! Le Boogie Woogie: Inside an After-Hours Club, by Terry Williams (introduction)

“Terry Williams has already established himself as a master of gaining access to hard-to-reach, hidden, and vulnerable populations. He has done so again here, giving an in-depth look at a place with which most people will be totally unfamiliar in a vivid and compelling style.”

~Richard E. Ocejo, author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy

We continue our spotlight on Harlem Week today with a excerpt from Le Boogie Woogie: Inside an After-Hours Club. The sociologist Terry Williams returns to the cocaine culture of Harlem in the 1980s and ’90s with an ethnographic account of a club he calls Le Boogie Woogie. He explores the life of a cast of characters that includes regulars and bar workers, dealers and hustlers, following social interaction around the club’s active bar, with its colorful staff and owner and the “sniffers” who patronize it. Le Boogie Woogie is an exceptional ethnographic portrait of an underground culture and its place within a changing city.