A bluegrass song plays on the jukebox. The banjo and fiddle duel it out.

A biker named Spanky waits his turn at a pool game and loudly taps out the rhythm of a washboard beat on his pool stick along with the song. He’s pretty damn good at it too.

The bar owner, an old Southerner who’s been sitting quietly on a stool, looks up and smiles, admiring his skill.

“Best jukebox in town!” Spanky yells to him. “You don’t find jukeboxes like this anymore.”

They’re at Red’s Park-Inn bar, an old, country-western dive in southwest Detroit. It could easily be in rural Tennessee. Hoods of race cars adorn the wood-paneled walls, and signs near liquor bottles say things like “Lord, if I can’t be skinny make my friends look fat.” The owner’s picture is embedded in a slab of polished wood someone made into a rustic clock and nailed above the bar. Not one but two placards warn players not to gamble on pool.

Outside, it’s a rough Detroit neighborhood. Inside, though, it’s a guarded slice of country life.

Almost everyone who hangs out here came to Detroit from Appalachia years ago, settling in this little pocket of the city. It’s an enclave that’s still inhabited by folks from Southern hills and mountains.

“Mostly country people come here. Appalachian,” says Sue Davis, 70, who owns the place with her husband Chuck, 74, called “Red” for his long-faded hair color. They live in the apartment above the bar. “A lot of Southern people come in here.”

The music, they say here, is the big draw. “Everybody comes for the jukebox,” bartender Pat Kaiser notes with pride. It has selections from Ernest Tubbs, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Flatt and Scruggs, Boxcar Willie — bluegrass, honky-tonk and old hillbilly songs that almost everyone in the bar knows the words to. Ask anyone in here about this place, and the first thing they mention is that jukebox.

Spanky buys a round for the drinkers seated on the barstools. It’s a friendly tradition here; you come in for a couple beers and wind up having six because everyone buys everyone else drinks without asking if they want one. Someone yells out to him. “Yessir?” the beefy biker replies politely. “Thanks for the drinks,” he’s told. “Yessir,” Spanky repeats. Call his name and he answers the same way. Tell him it’s his turn at pool and it’s the same thing.

The people here are miles and years from home, but country manners still hold sway.

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When World War II ended and the auto factories stopped making tanks and started making cars again, Appalachians fleeing life in the coal mines poured into town along what became known as the “Hillbilly Highway.”

They showed up in droves, seeking work and settling together in older Detroit neighborhoods or in growing suburbs such as Taylor and Hazel Park, which sometimes still gets called “Hazeltucky” — a nickname that’s no compliment.

The new arrivals were looked down upon, often considered backward. Their homes were called eyesores. Landlords sometimes refused to rent to them, fearful that dozens more would follow into the neighborhood. A survey conducted by Wayne State University in 1951 asked Detroiters to identify “undesirable people” in the city. “Poor Southern whites” and “hillbillies” were in a near tie with “criminals and gangsters” at the top of the list, well ahead of “transients,” “Negroes” and “drifters.”

When people look down on you for how you look and talk, you stay with your own. So the new arrivals stuck together and formed tight-knit groups. Their neighborhoods were so insular that many of their children, born and raised in Detroit, still speak with accents nearly as thick as those of their parents.

It’s the same twang you hear behind the counter at Telway Diner, on the stools at Alice’s Bar, and at the tables in George’s Famous Coney Island, where eastern Kentucky inflections can be heard all night. This swath of the city, along parts of Michigan Avenue, has long had an Appalachian flavor, kept alive all these years by the migrants’ clannishness.

That protectiveness prevails at the bar. “We screen everybody that comes in here,” says Kaiser, 54. The door is kept locked. When someone presses the buzzer, the bartender peeks out through a one-way window before releasing the lock. “If they look suspicious I won’t open the door to ‘em,” Sue says. It keeps the regulars safe and the outsiders out.

But lately there are fewer regulars and more strangers around here. The neighborhood’s changed; new arrivals have taken the place of the Southerners and filled their old blocks. “People just died off or moved back South,” Sue says. “We’ve had a lot of people pass away.”

Years ago, this part of southwestern Detroit was a Polish neighborhood. Then came the Appalachians. Now it’s Latinos pouring in, another wave coming here from somewhere to the south, just like those before them, looking for something better.

For many people, Detroit remains — despite how far it’s fallen — a better place than where they come from.

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Chuck Davis was once one of them. As a young man he moved north, worked hard, saved his earnings and soon owned his own used-car lot and a country-western bar just a short way down the road from each other.

He met Sue in Sunday school in a small church in a small Tennessee town. For their first date, he drove her over the Kentucky border for a milkshake and a burger. She was a coal miner’s daughter; her dad died from black lung at 42. It was the kind of fate folks there were fleeing from.

“People don’t know long time ago how people grew up and stuff down there,” Sue says. After serving overseas, Chuck returned and took her to Detroit.

He got the bar in 1971, and put his nickname on the sign, put the music he liked on the jukebox, and put the drinks he liked behind the bar. It wasn’t hard getting drinkers into a country joint back then.

“We’d be open at 7 in the morning and they’d be in the parking lot waiting for us,” she says. In those days, the neighborhood was full of auto parts makers and little factories. The night shift would leave work and fill the local bars with hillbillies as the sun came up.

Then the area declined, bartenders started getting robbed, and the buzzer was added to the door. Everyone grew older and the crowds thinned out. Now the bar’s down to several dozen friends who’ve weathered the stay up here, and like-minded people who come for the music and the company and the down-home culture.

“They just like the friendly people like us, I guess,” Sue says.

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It’s noon on Saturday. The ladies stroll one by one into the bar for their Avon party.

“I’ll put the catalogs right over thar,” one says in a coarse twang. They’re two hours early. But Avon is mostly an excuse for friends to spend a day together anyway, so the time doesn’t matter.

“I don’t even drink,” says Cleopatra Winkler, a regular. “I just drink water. Just come here to be sociable.”

The people here were drawn together by roots and traditions and lingering ties to home. It’s a rare night when those in the bar don’t know everyone who walks in the door.

“Everybody here’s connected somewhere,” the 75-year-old Winkler says.

Over time, Red’s had gone from a rough-and-tumble watering hole to a home base. It’s this group’s community center. They have their Halloween party here, and the Christmas party, and the parties for all the birthdays. On Friday nights, their husbands and boyfriends join them here, playing pool and listening to country music in the smoky air, like they’d be doing back where they came from.

“People here are all so very nice,” Winkler says “It’s like a country home.”

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times.

The smell inside the Canticle Café is unmistakable.

It’s an odor that clings to the homeless, one of long days spent out in the weather, of dried sweat and unwashed dirt.

It gets them kicked out of most places, keeps people at a distance and relegates them to a handful of spots like shelters, soup kitchens and churches, where they keep company with each other in a world within ours but separate from it.

Brother Al Mascia, a Franciscan friar with St. Aloysius Catholic Church, wanted to give the homeless an opportunity to feel what it’s like to be treated as a normal person, to be served instead of being told to leave.

So a few years ago, he converted his church’s warming center at Washington and State, where for years the homeless have come to escape the cold, into a traditional coffee shop for people living on the streets.

“Folks used to come in and would just serve themselves from a pot of coffee and a box of doughnuts,” says Mascia, 55. “We had folding chairs and a little TV with rabbit ears, and I figured we can do better than that.”

They began offering poetry slams, a piano to play, computers with Internet access, a television with a DVD player, different blends of organic coffee, light food like oatmeal and sandwiches, and a bakery making fresh muffins and rolls.

Same as a normal coffee shop, except here everything is free, nearly everybody is homeless, and nobody gets kicked out for how they look or smell.

In fact, the patrons are called “guests” by the staff instead of “clients” and are now served coffee by volunteer baristas. “We call them ‘guests’ because what we’re trying to do is stimulate the person’s sense of self-esteem and dignity,” Mascia says. They also offer traditional social services like counseling, visits with a nurse, utility assistance and warm clothing.

The café, named after a St. Francis song (“The Canticle of the Sun”), faces challenges a normal coffee shop doesn’t deal with, to say the least. The air carries a sharp odor that stays in your nostrils even after you leave. The language is sometimes foul; other times it’s incoherent. Some guests are crazy or strung out. A few nod out in their chairs after eating.

But most of the homeless here are well-behaved and courteous, as if to live up to the dignity the café tries to foster. An orderly line forms for coffee and muffins in the morning. The audience listens politely when someone reads a poem or sings a song. And almost everyone demures when Mascia, in the brown robe of a friar, walks by and says hello in the morning.

The café invites others from the area too, like lonely seniors who live in the high-rise, low-income apartments up and down Washington Boulevard, even downtown office workers. Mascia says he wants to mix people from different backgrounds, for the poor to interact with the more fortunate, for those who have it good to meet those who don’t.

“Once you make friends with folks who are living on the streets, as we have here, then you can’t just dismiss it, objectify it, depersonalize it,” he says. “Then they become real human beings, and you become concerned for their welfare.”

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“Welcome to my mind. Welcome to my madness.”

So begins the weekly Friday morning poetry slam. Its host, Grant Chapman, left, is reading from a binder of his laminated poems. He stands at a podium with a primitive beat box and a microphone rigged up to crude little computer speakers, reading his poetry to a fuzzed-out beat. He’s 48, lives in Hart Plaza and calls himself a “soul poet.”

Once he gets things rolling, audience members can come up, one by one, and say pretty much anything they want. Or sing. Or rant. There are few rules. “Some guys will talk about their experiences on the street, sometimes they might do a freestyle rap thing, so it’s pretty interesting,” says Michael Thomas, the café’s 44-year-old case manager. “It’s always something a little bit different.”

A woman meekly steps up to the microphone. “I’ve done things,” she says, mysteriously, as a bare-bones beat plays behind her words. She’s bundled in a coat and a wool hat. Her tone is confessional. “And I’m a sinner too. I’m not perfect.” When she’s finished she thanks God for keeping her alive and asks for a round of applause for him. The room obliges.

The religious overtones of the place, like the sight of a friar wandering around, like the colorful mural of St. Francis on the wall, an idyllic scene into which the faces of some volunteers have been painted, influence some of the stream-of-consciousness performances.

Cue Fred Thompson. He stands and launches into a spontaneous religious sermon at bone-rattling volume that has the guests frozen nervously in their chairs. “He does this once a week,” Chapman says, smirking. It’s just Thompson’s form of poetry.

Mascia never knows what talents lie hidden beneath the ragged appearance of those in the crowd. For instance, a homeless teen once came in for a doughnut. “I didn’t know who he was; he didn’t say a word. I thought he could be a gang member, he could be anything.” Then he sat at the piano and played Pachelbel’s Canon in D from memory.

“It just blew me away. You can never assume anything when it comes to the folks that we deal with. Unfortunately, many people have assumptions that lead them to be surprised that there are these many levels of richness in character and being among the homeless.”

Many of the volunteers here were once patrons. John Pokorney, left, who runs the bakery, lived in a fleabag motel down the street, near death and nearly homeless, spending his nights drinking away the depression that followed two bouts with brain cancer.

“I was very down and out, and one of my friends told me about this place, and I came by to get food,” the 31-year-old says. One side of his shorn head has a thick scar from his surgeries. When he speaks his face shows the intensity of someone who has twice stood on the edge of death and isn’t sure he’s back. He still needs treatments, fistfuls of pills, endless tests and checkups.

But he asked to work here, quit drinking and stayed. “I found my purpose here.”

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There’s a new, landscaped boulevard running down the middle of Washington. The restored, historic Book Cadillac hotel gleams across the street. And groups of homeless people spill out from the café, loitering in groups by parked cars or the flowerbeds, or ambling past out-of-towners walking down the block.

It wasn’t what many had in mind when restoring this part of town.

“Some of our guests are rough around the edges, and they’ll approach people, panhandling with a level of aggression that we’re not happy with,” Mascia says.

Since the hotel reopened and the street was redone, he’s heard calls to move the café somewhere, anywhere. Just not here. Wandering vagrants and timid tourists don’t mix.

The café volunteers, though, defend the homeless customers. “Very few actually panhandle right here,” Thomas says. “But you’re in downtown Detroit; if you’re near here and they have a problem with a homeless person, they’re going to put it on us even if it’s someone that I’ve never seen here before.”

Mascia wants to keep the café in this spot downtown, because its customers call this area home. There’s room here, he says, for those from the extremes of society to share the same part of the city, to give people the chance to learn something from others who live in a world very much unlike their own.

“Another way of looking at urban renewal is mixing people up, having a neighborhood of diversity,” he says. “The benefit of that is the enrichment of lives all around. We’re all enriched when we get to know people from different walks of life.”

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times.