CLIMBING THE LADDER Norman Seawright III

Nelson Street Blues The fabled former main street of Greenville’s black community has fallen on hard times. But some envision a road to recovery. t’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon and a drunk staggers, stumbles and scuffles across Nelson Street, not at all sure where he wants to go. Just ahead, there’s a liquor store. Next door is an abandoned building that’s turned into a neighborhood hangout of sorts. He chooses the hangout, and a yellow Ford Mustang with black stripes slows to allow him to lurch awkwardly across the street. A group of men – all of them drinking – chases him away. i BY JON HAYWOOD

MIRIAM TAYLOR Nelson Street has fallen on hard times, but once it was a hot spot of black entertainment, a sort of unofficial Main Street for Greenville’s African-American community.

That’s Nelson Street today, a place of ruins and remnants. There are a few stores, some churches, a club here and there. But mostly it’s a place of broken dreams and drunks and shuttered storefronts.

THE HEYDAY

In its heyday, Nelson Street was alive and brimming with revelers. It was main street for Greenville’s African-American community, a business and entertainment hub known throughout the South as a magnet for top bands and bluesmen.

The street once boasted more than 100 businesses, according to former Greenville High School bandleader Roy Huddleston, a sort of unofficial Nelson Street historian who keeps a list of them on yellowed notebook paper. People swarmed to New Town Café, the Delta Store and the famous Flowing Fountain nightclub, where the music never seemed to stop.

“You could walk along Nelson Street all night long,” says Johnnie Wright, former

owner of Johnnie’s Lounge. It was the ultimate social gathering place for blacks. People dressed up in their best finery to stroll its sidewalks. Seeing and being seen was part of the fun. “You went along Nelson Street just to see what everyone else was doing,” she says.

It wasn’t just black-owned and blackrun for black customers. There were also Chinese grocery stores and white-owned establishments. Many places served all of Greenville, such as Brown’s Bakery.

But Nelson got much of its fame from its role as an entertainment mecca, catering to the raw styling of Delta blues, “the devil’s music,” as some preachers called it. People came from near and far to hear the rhythmic, roaring, rumbling sound of down-home blues. The sidewalks were packed most of the day and well into the night, and folks driving by would slow their cars to enjoy the music wafting out of the clubs.

Nelson Street emerged as an entertainment powerhouse in the 1950s, a time when black expression — musical, artistic or political — was not widely accepted in many parts of the South. But here, it thrived. While other Delta towns were clamping down curfews, Greenville let the good times roll on Nelson Street.

It became a place for young musicians to make a name for themselves at the rollicking clubs. It was frequented by the likes of Little Milton, Bobbie Rush and Sonny Boy Williamson II. Other musicians, such as Willie Love and Charlie Booker, were made famous by Nelson Street. In 1951, Love recorded his renowned “Nelson Street Blues” for Jackson record label Trumpet, wailing about how “you can have all the fun you want” on Nelson Street and citing local landmarks, including the Snow White Laundry and the Deluxe Barber Shop. Booker recorded his music live for rival Modern Records at the Casablanca restaurant and lounge. In “No Ridin’ Blues,” Booker paid his respects to the local party scene when he sang that “Greenville’s smokin’, Leland’s burnin’

NORMAN SEAWRIGHT Former Greenville High School band leader Roy Huddleston says Nelson Street began its decline in the 1970s, when musicians went to bigger venues in Clarksdale and Memphis.

down.”

Several bluesmen had their own radio shows on WGVM and WJPR. Disc jockey Rocking Eddie Williams had a record store on the street.

Other blues hot spots were Henry T’s Pool Room, the Silver Dollar Café and the Blue Note. In later years, another blues club would add to Nelson Street’s fame.

THE FLOWING FOUNTAIN

The Flowing Fountain was opened in the 1970s by Perry Payton and halfbrother Roy Huddleston. It became so beloved, such a dominant force on the Greenville blues scene, that Little Milton is said to have based his 1987 hit song, “Annie Mae’s Café,” on the club. Big-name performers Bobbie Rush, Tyrone Davis, Chick Willis and Little Milton himself performed there.

Bernice “Peaches” Jones is a Nelson Street legend. She worked at the Flowing Fountain as a bartender for 25 years, from its inception until it closed.

To be fair, bartender doesn’t do her justice. As Peaches puts it, she pretty much ran the place.

On a warm spring day, she sits in her kitchen tending to dinner on a hot stove, her eyes lighting up as she recalls how almost every Delta bluesman performed at the club. The only two who didn’t, she says, were Bobby “Blue” Bland and B.B. King, because the club couldn’t hold the crowd that would have shown up.

Music impresario Quincy Jones once stopped by. “The Flowing Fountain was a place everyone liked to go,” Peaches says. “We sold whiskey all night long.”

“That was the good-time place,” echoes Huddleston, who had his own band at the time and for years was the bandleader at Greenville High School.

Business at the Flowing Fountain slowed in 2000 after the death of Payton, a strong man with a reputation as a good businessman. The street had already fallen upon hard times and the club eventually shut down, Peaches says, because Payton’s elderly widow couldn’t keep up with running the business.

To many of its followers, the closing of the Flowing Fountain seemed to be the death knell for Nelson Street.

The decline

Huddleston says Nelson actually began its long decline in the late 1970s, when big-name musicians started playing at bigger venues in Clarksdale and Memphis.

Wright blames the street’s decline on a generational shift. As older people died, so did their businesses. Most young people in the area weren’t interested in the blues, she says.

For Huddleston, another part of the decline was a change in leadership on Nelson Street. Some of Greenville’s giants of black civic leadership were also businessmen on Nelson. James Carter, Benjamin Cook and others helped create a sense of pride there.

The decline also can be traced to

LEFT | Little Milton (pictured), Bobby Rush and countless other name performers loved to play Nelson Street.

BELOW | The state has placed Nelson Street on its Mississippi Blues Trail and there is hope that where a marker rises, tourists will follow.

economic changes sweeping the Delta. Black flight to the industrial North accelerated when mechanization made it unnecessary for farmers to depend on cheap labor to tend and harvest their crops. With the farm jobs lost to mechanical cotton pickers and better herbicides, blacks left in droves to search for work and a better life.

In the Cold War era of the 1950s and early 1960s, Greenville was home to an Air Force base. Many of the airmen and employees of the base spent time and money on Nelson Street. When the base closed in 1965, so did a major source of the street’s revenue.

Some blame the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As crack came, so did crime. A Chinese grocer’s murder prompted other grocers to pull out, and several other businesses followed. Some business owners didn’t feel safe anymore and didn’t want to invest their time and money in an area known for sporadic crime.

HOPE FOR NELSON

For a while, the city talked of trying to revive the night scene on Nelson Street. The Mississippi Blues Commission placed a historical marker there, anointing it as part of the state’s Blues Trail. But it continued its slide, and the club scene in Greenville began to shift to the Walnut Street entertainment district at the foot of the Mississippi River levee downtown, where the city has tried to foster growth by etching the names of legendary bluesmen into the sidewalks.

Today, with all the closed, decaying buildings, it’s hard to believe Nelson ever amounted to anything. But the lure of history is still strong. There are those who would like to see it return to glory.

“They should open it back up. There’s nowhere else for older folks to go,” says

NORMAN SEAWRIGHT

Peaches.

“If it comes back, it won’t be the same, because the young folk certainly aren’t going to the blues,” warns Wright.

There are plans to reopen the Flowing Fountain. David Williams and Nikeka Nelson are hard at work on repairs. They planned to have the club, which was to be known simply as the Fountain, open sometime in the fall.

Williams believes reopening the Flowing Fountain will bring back jobs to Nelson Street. He has gotten Peaches to agree to come back to the Fountain as its bartender. The club’s new co-owners bought the building from Payton’s widow, Hazel. Nelson adds that she and Williams are developing a scholarship program for young people interested in pursuing music as a career, to help revive the area and the Greenville community.

“It would be a shame to let Nelson Street go to waste,” Williams says.