BEST BLUES VENUE
INSIDE AN OLD cotton-grading warehouse in Clarksdale, the audience is buzzing with anticipation for the evening’s show. It’s just a routine Saturday (or Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, for that matter) at Ground Zero Blues Club. The walls are plastered with old concert posters and heavily graffitied with signatures, and the patrons are as diverse as the international flags hanging overhead. Servers deliver baskets of hot tamales, catfish, and fried green tomatoes to tables that are cramped with mismatched chairs. Music lovers, young and old, have converged from all around the globe in this corner of Mississippi to hear the blues in the place it was born.
“The quality of the music that’s played here, it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard anywhere else,” says co-owner Eric Meier. “The experience is really high-energy, almost like a revival or family reunion. The beauty [of this venue] is that we get everyone from European travelers with young kids who are experiencing the South for the first time to people who grew up on this music and want to recognize that it’s still alive and well.”
Meier, together with entertainment executive Howard Stovall and actor Morgan Freeman, owns the club, which opened in 2001. It carries on a long tradition of this genre’s presence in the region—and in Clarksdale in particular, a place where, according to legend, bluesman Robert Johnson went to the crossroads and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for super-natural guitar skills.
Although Johnson and other notable Delta-born musicians like Muddy Waters and Sam Cooke were around long before Ground Zero’s inception, there’s a new crop of homegrown talent (including James “Super Chikan” Johnson and Grammy Award winner Christone “Kingfish” Ingram) dropping in here for regular performances and carrying the torch.
And hopefully, in time, another generation of artists and listeners will find their way to this singular space.
—Tara Massouleh McCay
BEST BBQ JOINTS
1. The Shed Barbeque & Blues Joint Multiple Locations 2.ThePig&Pint Jackson 3.Handy Andy Oxford 4. Memphis Barbecue Co. Horn Lake 5. Leatha’s Bar-B-Que Petal 6. Abe’s Bar-B-Q Clarksdale 7. Ubon’s Barbeque of Yazoo Yazoo City 8. The Little Dooey Starkville 9. Murky Waters BBQ Multiple Locations
BEST TAMALES FAT MAMA’S TAMALES IN 1989, LOCALS Britton and Jimmy Gammill opened Fat Mama’s in the middle of downtown Natchez. Originally housed in a 600-square-foot log cabin, it’s now located in a larger building across the street and run by the couple’s son David. Fat Mama’s is still known for its namesake dish: beef-and-pork-stuffed spicy masa bundled in corn husks. The best way to enjoy the delicacy? Unwrap your packet of goodness, douse it in their homemade hot sauce, and wash it down with a signature “Knock-You-Naked” Margarita. —Tara Massouleh McCay
MELANIE DUNEA
