Cotton Eyed Joe goes LED
Chuck Ward, owner of Cotton Eyed, is looking to improve its existing sign, so he took the old sign down with plans to replace the neon with LED lighting.
“When you’re getting four or five hundred calls from people complaining … voicing their opinion about the sign, you want to get it fixed," he said.
“This sign was put up 33 years ago, and it’s an eyesore. It doesn’t work,” Ward said. “The neon’s out of it because of the transformers or things of that nature.
“So, we started taking bids about two years ago to redo it,” he said. “And, the gentleman who originally built it came to me and said, ‘I can redo it.’ So that’s who we went with, Tony Saples with Neon Services.
“He came out, looked at it and we discussed a couple quotes,” Ward said. “We decided we’d let (Saples) do it.
“It’s been about six months in the works to take it down just because of the weather, and he’s very busy.
“Finally, this week we got a chance to take it down, and here we are,” he said. “It’s in his shop, getting ready to be refurbished.
“It will basically look the same,” Ward said. “It will have new skin on it, which will be white, and the letters will be embossed, like they are now, but instead of neon, it will be LED.
“That’s what will last,” he added. “Neon’s just very hard to take care of because it’s exposed. It’s right out in the middle of the weather all the time.
“If a bird flies into it or if it rains real hard, it can break,” Ward said. “If it gets wet, it can cause it to short out. And there are so many moving pieces to it. There may be six different sections of neon in one letter.
“It causes it to be hard to deal with, hard to be functional,” he added. “It was great
in its day, but since they came out with LED … you’ll look around here in the bar, all these signs now are LED. They’re not neon anymore. Everything’s been changed out. I don’t think we have a neon sign anymore.”
The exterior sign was 60 feet in the air when they took it down.
“It’s just going to be refurbished,” Ward said about the old sign. “It will be the same sign, same frame, the same size.
“They’ll put new aluminum skin on it then put the letters on it and put the LED,” he said. One thing he would like to add, however, it the words “World Famous.”
Since Ward, who has an entertainment production background, purchased Cotton Eyed Joe nine years ago, he has been making small improvements.
“When I bought the bar,
it had carpet on the floor, which was completely nasty, unsafe and unhealthy,” he
recalled. “But, we do a deep
clean every Thursday. We
really strive to keep [Cotton Eyed Joe] clean, reseal the parking lot every couple years, makes it look new and fresh.”
Otherwise, Ward said it’s “been business as usual.”
“We’ve stayed extremely busy since the end of last year,” he said. “And, we’ve
got a couple concerts coming up.”
Patrons can expect to hear Aaron Watson on Feb. 26, Ares Fight Night on March 27 and Drake Milligan on April 4.
Additionally, “we’re trying to shoot a TV show here,” Ward teased.
And, “we signed a new contract with Peachtree Entertainment, and they’re booking and providing all of our concerts and entertainment, and we’ll have all our normal things going on … dance, dance, dance,” he said.
