Club Ebony

Club Ebony was built at Indianola just after the Second World War by a local entrepreneur, Johnny Jones, who bought the Hanna Avenue property with his wife Josephine in November 1945 and had the room open by about 1948. It became one of the most important Black nightclubs in the South, and the bookings were not a local circuit: Count Basie, Ray Charles, Bobby Bland, Little Milton, Albert King and Willie Clayton all played it, along with B. B. King. Jones had run other rooms in the town, among them the Jones Nite Spot on Church Street, where a boy called Riley King used to watch Louis Jordan, Jay McShann and Sonny Boy Williamson through the gaps in the wall slats. Church Street carried a dozen more places, the Cotton Club, the Blue Chip, Stella B.'s and the Key Hole Inn among them, though most of those offered blues from a jukebox rather than a stage. Its later history is one man refusing to let the room close. King came back for a homecoming every year from 1980 and made a late night set at Club Ebony the end of it, and when Mary Shepard retired in 2008 after thirty four years he bought the building himself rather than see it shut, giving it to the B. B. King Museum in 2012. The museum stands about three hundred yards away in a brick cotton gin of around 1905, picked by two architectural surveys on the merits before King mentioned that he had worked in it. The club closed in 2020, was found to be leaking through its roof and walls, and reopened in June 2023 after a restoration costing more than eight hundred thousand dollars that kept the metal ceiling and the old recessed neon.