Lem's Bar-B-Q
311 E. 75th St.
Chicago, IL 60619
(773) 994-2428
We used to barbecue pigs [in Mississippi]. They’d always kill hogs around Thanksgiving time, you know what I mean. My daddy made a little brick pit outside the house and we used to barbecue…And when we came to Chicago, we started working in restaurant… And years later, my younger brother came along, and that’s when we opened up the barbecue place. – James Lemons
James Lemons and his four brothers grew up in Indianola, Mississippi, where their mother taught them to cook, and where they worked each fall slaughtering hogs. When he was fourteen, James followed his brothers to Chicago and into the barbecue business. His oldest brother, Miles, known as Lem to friends, found a place on 59th street, where he opened his namesake barbecue joint in 1951. Lem’s quickly gained a reputation for not only being the first place to serve rib tips in town, but for its sauce. The sauce originated from his mother’s recipe and is still made from scratch every day. In 1967 the brothers opened a second location on 75th Street. Today, it’s the only Lem’s location, and James Lemons is the last brother to oversee the family business. And after more than fifty years in the Windy City, James Lemons is still connected to the Mississippi Delta. He’s cousin to Mary Shepard, former owner of Indianola’s legendary Club Ebony. But even though he’s from Mississippi, James Lemons says his barbecue is Chicago-style—because that’s where it’s been the longest.
What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
SUBJECT: James Lemons
DATE: March 26, 2008
LOCATION: Lem’s Bar-B-Q
INTERVIEWER & PHOTOGRAPHER: Amy Evans
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 in Chicago, Illinois, on 75th Street at Lem’s Bar-B-Q with Mr. James Lemons; and sir, would you mind saying your name and your birthday for the record?
James Lemons: James Lemons. Birthday: August 13, 1928.
And, as I understand it, you’re from Indianola, Mississippi.
Indianola, Mississippi, yeah.
And you moved here with your brothers when you were a teenager, is that right?
Yeah, teenagers—came to Chicago in 1942.
Now did you come with your parents or did y’all—your brothers just come on your own?
Came with my brother—my older brother [Miles].
And what are you brothers’ names?
Miles Lemons, Bruce, Clyde, and Leon.
Did y’all know people up here in Chicago?
Well my daddy had a brother here. And that’s the only reason I came is because my other brother came, you know. And then there’s the reason. So then we came to Chicago and started working and me, I went in the cooking field, and my other brother, he was already one of them fellows like messing around in the kitchen. He’s the one that started the barbecue sauce. He passed away in 1901—I mean, yeah, in 2001. 200—I’ll get it together—he passed away.
So if you both came up here and started getting in the cooking business, were you cooking at home in Indianola?
Well, my mother used to have food in the kitchen, but she had to have them because she had six boys, and she didn’t have no girls. So we all had to—had cooking days and cleanup days and cook, cook, cook. Had weeks that we’d cook and, you know, and that trained us to be good too. Back then, that’s what they say but now, you know—now days they don’t look at it like that. The ladies have to do all the housecleaning. Mens do it to. [Short Laugh]
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And so I imagine back then y’all were raising your own meat and had a garden and whatnot?
Yeah, had gardens and raised chicken, even a couple of pigs, yeah.
Did y’all ever barbecue pigs down there?
Yeah, we used to barbecue pigs—pork, you know. They’d always kill hogs around Thanksgiving time, you know what I mean. My daddy had a little—made a little brick pit outside the house and we used to barbecue smoke—smoke meat; we had a smokehouse, you know, and things—. We always fooled around with it, you know—smoking meat and—and cooking meat on the grill; that’s what we called it back then. We didn’t call it a pit; we called it a grill. So that’s how we got to working doing that, and when we came to Chicago we started working in restaurants. And mostly that was—most jobs back then and then the war [WWII] came, you know—came along so a lot of people went to the factories and we went to—my brother and I stayed in the cooking business. And years later, my younger brother came along, and that’s when we opened up the barbecue place. They opened up the barbecue place; I came in on there later on.
So they opened it in [nineteen]’51. When did you get involved?
Well I got involved in it right around ’54, ’55—somewhere along in there.
And if I can ask you to back up a little bit talking about when your family would have hog-killings in Indianola, was there a sauce component to cooking that pig back then or not?
No, a little thing my mother used to call spicy gravy and that’s where they started with the barbecue sauce. And my brother [Miles], he worked on it; he used to work on it all the time at his home, and he had a wife that she helped him with it, too, you know, but she passed away too. And then when my other brother, Bruce, came to Chicago, that’s when my brother got involved with the sauce.
So would you say the sauce you serve today, it’s a sauce that is still based on what your mother served?
That’s what they first started with, and we just spiced it up a little bit and with different types of spices. And as you eat, when you make something you—you taste it and then when you hit that taste, you know when—and that’s what you stick with for a while. So it was a couple of years we was in business before we had any luck at that sauce. But we still used to make our own. From day one, we made our own sauce.
Can you describe your sauce without giving too much away?
Well it just—I don’t know, just spicy paste, not real hot, just kind of—kind of hot but not like a lot of people want barbecue sauce. They want real, real—and it ain't thick like gravy. We try to make it smooth where it will be—stick to the meat. The sauce is sauce and gravy is gravy and they’re both—and don’t—don’t taste the same, so that’s why we call ours the barbecue sauce. People say it’s thin. Well, if you want gravy, then we can make it thicker, but it ain't going to taste the same, you know.
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So do you have an idea of what made your brothers want to get into the barbecue business and have a place of their own?
No, I don’t have the idea of what made him—I guess he wanted his own business, and he had a friend that was saying barbecue would be about the best thing to go into, you know, and when that—at that time, they didn’t have very many barbecue places in Chicago. They had a few.
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So and I understand, over the years, there have been two locations of Lem’s.
It’s the only one. The one on 59th Street had problems with the property and I don’t know. I’d say the city run us out of there, and they wanted to put a fire department—a fire station there, you know. So they couldn’t have a fire station and a barbecue place next to each other. [Laughs] So they found all kinds of complaints with the building and things.
So then is this one the original one or was that one?
The one on 59th Street was the original one. That’s where they had the place.
So then was there a time when both were open at the same time at all?
Uh-hmm, yeah. Yeah, in 19—we opened out here [on 75th Street] in 1967—’67—and that one opened down there in 1952.
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What was the pit like over there? Was it one of these aquarium pits or was it a brick pit or something else?
No, no. We—we always had this—this type of pit [an aquarium-style pit]. I’m trying to think of the man that, when we first went in business, built this pit.
Was it Leo Davis?
Yeah, Leo Davis. Yeah, Mr. Davis.
Yeah, because we were talking earlier about Smokestack Lightning by Lolis Eric Elie, and he said that in 1951 Leo Davis started making these aquarium style pits and then Lem’s—the first Lem’s opened a year later, so these were already kind of the popular way of smoking meat at the time.
Yeah. Well they had a couple pits out like this. Well the fellow that used to be in the barbecue business, he was in there for a long time; he’s passed away now. His name was Harvey Collins; he’s the—him and his brothers, they had barbecue places, and we all come from Indianola. They—they came from Indianola, too. And it was about six brothers up—and all of them had barbecue places except one, Stoop—Stoop Collins. He was the Big Shot, we called him. He—he had a lot of property he had bought here and, you know, because he had been here for a long—well he’s much older than we were you know—had been in for a long time.
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So tell me about the name Lem’s Bar-B-Q. Is that just a shortened version of your last name?
Well everybody used to call—well my last name is Lemons, and we just took it from the name that people done gave my older brother. They used to call him Lem, you know. He used to like to play golf, and the fellows that he played golf with, they called him Lem for—his name was Lemons and they called him Lem, so we just took the name and put it as Lem’s Bar-B-Q.
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I read, too, that Lem’s was the first barbecue place to serve rib tips in Chicago.
Rib tips, yes. At that time back then, they was throwing them away. Yeah. Yeah, they used to throw—they used to—I’m trying to think—I’m getting old. If you had called me a couple years earlier, I could have, you know, told you all this stuff, you know, real good. Used to—all the barbecue places, they used to just cut part of the tip off the rib and cook the rib, and they’d throw it away. So my brother said, “Well,” he said, “I’m going to take that tip and cook it and see how it do.” So then we started selling them.
They did awfully well, evidently.
He started selling rib tips in 1952—’52—’53—’53 they started selling rib tips, you know, and they started cooking, and they cut the meat and they found out that you could take that tip off of the slab, and the slab wouldn’t be so bony, you know what I mean? And that’s when they started taking the tip off and calling the rib the St. Louis-style rib, you know, and now they got all kinds of names.
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And so tell me about the cooking here in this aquarium-style pit you have. You use a combination of wood and charcoal?
Yeah, wood and charcoal—wood is to do most of the cooking. The charcoal is to give you the heat because if you just used wood alone, it would take you a long time to cook that—cook them tips and things, you know…And it takes—it would take a long time to cook, you know. The ribs cook fast; tips it takes—takes a little longer to cook and you have to kind of—see the fire. There’s the fire.
So what kind of wood is this that Don [pitmaster Donnell Walker] is bringing in?
Oak and hickory, yeah. And some people, they got different—they got all kind of wood now and some people use—we don’t ever try—I only tried oak and hickory. They got a couple more other brands of wood they say is good, but I never tried them. And I just use charcoal and the hickory and the oak mixed, so you can get your flavor.
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So let me ask you this: Being from Mississippi, you know, I’ve noticed since I’ve been here there are a lot of restaurants and—and food stands and things that advertise you know “Mississippi seafood” or “Mississippi fried chicken.” Do you think that there is, you know, that—Mississippi being used as—as a kind of signifier of where the food is coming from is a popular thing here in Chicago and why?
Well it might be, but that’s where mostly peoples—you see, it’s a funny thing; that’s where I’ll say seventy-five percent of the people that comes to Chicago come from the state of Mississippi. Because back then when the War was—broke—first broke out [World War II] that’s where most of the people came from—came to Chicago because they could get jobs, you know, or get better jobs, you know. You know, how things was back then; don’t have to tell you. You know—you—you read about it, you know, if you don’t understand—that they came to Chicago to get better jobs. They tried to make their life better. And 75-percent of them come from the State of Mississippi and Louisiana and Arkansas and they come to Chicago. Now the other states like Tennessee and maybe Louisiana, they went to New York and them places. Then over in Arkansas and them things. People, they went to California, you know. I’m speaking the black peoples, you know. They treaded different ways, and seventy-five percent of the peoples came to Chicago. That’s why it’s so many different little businesses, you see, that say Mississippi, Mississippi, Mississippi because that’s where they originated from; that’s where they came from. The only reason they came there from—left that is because they couldn’t get work or they wanted to find something better here in working. Because back then, you know, everybody don’t want to keep picking cotton and trying to have us a better living, you know. You know how the Depression was, so I mean it’s nothing you had to do with it or nothing I had to do with it. We can't hide it; it was there and it worked its way out. People worked their way out and went and did what they had to do to try to get out of it, you know. And through all of it—found a lot of good things and sweated away a lot of bad things, you know. You know what I mean? But then it just—bad that as people that we had to live and go through them kind of things, you know, but that’s—that’s the way of life, you know, and give you something to look forward to, you know, seeing something better or seeing something being done better, you know. I mean it’s just like I tell people they say, you know—I said, “If it wasn’t for the white people, if they didn’t like you or some of them didn’t care about you, you wouldn’t be here.” So we was outnumbered from day one. So somebody cared about somebody—wanted you to be—do good, you know what I mean. So everybody can't be bad, you know; you have to push the bad to the side and step over the good and try to keep walking, that’s all, you know what I mean. Because everybody ain't bad, you know. Everybody ain't hateful. I mean everybody don’t hate one another, you know. But in the end you got to say not only that—I said you have that in your own race. You go, “Oh, I’m better than you just because I got more money than you got.” But it’s not true. It don’t make you better. What’s in here who—is what makes you better, you know, the kind of heart you got, you know. That’s life, you know, and you have to live—you have to live through it, so—. The only thing I can say is just ask the man upstairs to live better—hear the way God—.
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So what do you think makes good barbecue?
What makes good barbecue is you got to try to move it and try to sell it and don’t overcook it and don’t cook it too long and don’t move it off-hand, you know. Try to get your stuff—keep fresh stuff moving; keep—keep it moving, you know.
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So would you call Lem’s Bar-B-Q would you call it Chicago-style?
Well, yeah. It would have to be Chicago-style now. It would have to be Chicago-style. [Laughs]
And what makes it Chicago-style, would you say?
Because it’s where it’s been the longest. [Laughs] It’s where it’s been the longest. It was created from Mississippi, but it’s Chicago barbecue.
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So what is your role here now? You’re here every day, from what I understand.
Yeah, well, I come every day. I can't do too much work no more because I got old, but I just watch things and try to keep an eye on things, so they don’t take advantage of it. I try to keep it so it will stay the same, you know—you know tastes and, you know, sometime I just have—have to leave it alone because it—you get too old. That barbecue, you can't—you know it’s good once in a while but when you got to do it every day, it’s kind of different—different habit.
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Have you been back to Mississippi over the years?
I’ve been to Indianola—Two thousand two. Two thousand two I was down there. And I still have some relatives there. Yeah—in 2002. It done built up so it’s—I call it a little—little Chicago, a little city. It done built up and growed. It’s did well.
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Well what else can you tell me about being in the barbecue business all these fifty-plus years?
It’s a lot of work—a whole lot of work. Like I tell people, they say, “Well I want to go in the barbecue business”—friends of mine. I say, “Well I tell you what, I’m going to tell you about the barbecue business.” You got to be able to work, and you got to want to work because if you don’t, it’s the wrong business to go in. Otherwise, I don’t think you’re going to do well, if you don’t like to work or if you don’t mind working. You have to make up your mind that, you know, that you have to work. Your money you invested—if you don’t work, you ain't going to make it. And if you’re not the type that’s going to give it your all, leave it alone because it’s just money you’re throwing away. Somebody else will make it.
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Now what is the future of Lem’s Barbecue? Is one of your children going to take it over?
Well my daughter [Carmen Lemons], she’s going to try to franchise it. She’s working on it, so I wish her luck with it…She wants to go as far as she can go with it, I guess. Another young lady I got working for me—her name is Walker—Emma Walker; she been about twenty-seven, twenty-eight years. She’s like my daughter. I love her. I love her just like I love my daughter because she done gave me all she can give and all she—you know, and she’s a good lady. Her and my daughter, they—they’ll make it work.
Did you and your brothers ever imagine that there’d be fifty-plus years in the barbecue business when you opened that first place over on 59th [Street]?
My older brother did—the one that passed away, Lem [Miles Lemons]. He just—you know he—he used to say, “Well maybe I waited too long before I started.” But he was proud of it, you know.
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Have your other brothers passed?
Yeah, yeah. I got three—two other brothers still living but they wasn’t in the barbecue business. One brother lives in Kansas City; he retired from the banking. He’s Vice President of the Douglas State Bank there in Kansas City, and he retired from there. I had another brother who worked for UPS [United Parcel Service], and he been retired ten years from UPS. He retired— I don’t know—he was a big shot out there with UPS. That’s what I call it because you know—but—so you know—. They all wasn’t in the—in the barbecue business.
But all the Lemons boys have done good.
Yeah, all turned out pretty good. Yeah, I go out there and look at my mama’s picture at night and I say, “You did a good job. You did a pretty good job,” you know.
To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.