Ground Zero Blues Club Is Mississippi's Best Blues Club, According To Our Readers

Inside a former cotton-grading warehouse in Clarksdale, the audience is buzzing with anticipation for the evening’s show. It’s 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 cramped with mismatched chairs. Music lovers, young and old, have converged from all over the globe to 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 a 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.” 

History Of Ground Zero Blues Club

Meier, together with entertainment executive Howard Stovall, the late Bill Luckett (a local blues promoter, former Clarksdale mayor, and attorney), 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, the place where, according to legend, bluesman Robert Johnson went to the crossroads and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for supernatural guitar skills.

Since the club opened more than two decades ago, it has welcomed thousands of blues lovers to a town of around 13,000 people. One show at the venue, and it's easy to see why our readers voted it the best blues club in Mississippi in our 2024 South's Best awards. For the full experience, catch a show and dinner in the Blues Club, then head upstairs to the Delta Cotton Company Apartments, where you can stay overnight. The following day, head just a few doors down to the Delta Blues Museum, where you can continue your education in this legendary style of music and its deep roots in Mississippi. 

Notable Blues Performers

Though Robert Johnson and other notable Delta-born musicians like Muddy Waters and Sam Cooke were around long before Ground Zero’s inception, a new crop of homegrown talent, including James “Super Chikan” Johnson and Grammy Award winner Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, drop in for regular performances and are carrying the torch. 

"Ground Zero Blues Club is one of my old stomping grounds," Ingram said in an interview with Southern Living. "It was one of the places that gave me an opportunity to get on stage and showcase my talent even when I probably didn't deserve to at a certain time. That's what it means to me. It's home."

Listen to Kingfish's Episode of Biscuits & Jam

And hopefully, in time, a whole new generation of artists and listeners will find their way to this singular space. 

groundzerobluesclub.com; 387 Delta Ave, Clarksdale, MS 38614; 662-621-9009