Clarksdale, Mississippi has long been described as "Ground Zero" for blues aficionados from around the globe.  It all started here. That's why Ground Zero Blues Club® was created  to celebrate the area's rich blues heritage and to provide a forum in which it can continue.

Located at Blues Alley next door to the Delta Blues Museum in the heart of historic downtown Clarksdale, Ground Zero Blues Club® opened in May 2001. Owned by local attorney and businessman, Bill Luckett; Academy Award-winning actor and Mississippi Delta resident, Morgan Freeman; and Clarksdale native and Memphis entertainment executive, Howard Stovall; Ground Zero Blues Club® is the place for anyone looking for an authentic Delta Blues experience.

The mission is to showcase the best of today's Delta Blues musicians. Although some national acts perform from time to time, visitors are more likely to find the "real deal" at Ground Zero Blues Club® — those musicians who live in the Mississippi Delta and continue in the tradition of their musical forefathers Charley Patton, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.

Ground Zero Blues Club® has been featured on CBS' 60 Minutes, CNN, Turner South, The Food Network, The Travel Channel, and The Discovery Channel and was the site for filming of Last of The Mississippi Jukes and Blues Divas. Named in 2005 as one of the "Top 100 Bars and Nightclubs in America” the club has been featured in publications such as National Geographic Traveler, Southern Living, USA Today, Esquire Japan, Food and Wine, The Washington Post and TV Guide — to name but a few.

The blues club is the latest venture for Freeman and attorney Bill Luckett. Howard Stovall, the executive director of the Blues Foundation in Memphis, joins the duo in bringing the Delta something it wants; a place to hear the blues.

"This is a venue for the blues," said Freeman, while sitting on a desk in the small office in the of the club. It doesn't matter whether it is traditional blues or new stuff, Freeman just wants a place for blues artists to play and blues fans to hear what they love.

The club is housed in a building in downtown Clarksdale that was built in the early 1900s. Ground Zero has really genuine feel to it with uneven floor boards, Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling, blues posters on the walls, vinyl tablecloths and mismatched chairs.

Customers can even say they've had a "hand in the club" by drawing their handprint on the bar, the wall or the floor.

Juke joints and small clubs pepper the Delta landscape, but there has never been a blues club in the Delta with the potential to attract national acts the way Ground Zero is expected to do in the future.

The club was open for business a week prior to the grand opening last Sunday night and Luckett said that it has been packed to almost maximum capacity almost every night.

According to Luckett, Ground Zero is already making a name for itself among foreign travelers who want to hear some authentic blues. The Clarksdale attorney said the club has already been visited by travelers from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada.

Leonard and Phil Chess's legendary Chicago label helped invent rock'n'roll with Ike Turner, brought  the minimalist blues of Muddy Waters, and provided a direct influence on the young Rolling Stones

Frank Zappa once said that the best years of rock were when records were produced by "cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product that came and said, 'I don't know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, all right.'"

Leonard and Phil Chess were prototypical cigar-chomping, old-fashioned record men who took a chance on music they didn't understand. Jewish immigrants from Poland, they got into the record business more or less by chance: Leonard bought a liquor store in an African American neighbourhood on the south side of Chicago, and did well enough that he opened a small nightclub called the Macomba Lounge. It was a rough ghetto bar, patronised by prostitutes and drug dealers, but from the start it was known for having good music. In the late-1940s, that meant it had jazz groups playing bebop, pop tunes, and mellow blues ballads. That was what the better-paying black patrons preferred to hear, and when Leonard got involved with a small local label, Aristocrat Records, that was what he intended to record.

It was only after the first few records went nowhere that he took a chance on another kind of musician, a Mississippi singer who was too raw and country-sounding to have pleased the crowds at the Macomba. In fact, when Leonard Chess first heard Muddy Waters sing I Can't Be Satisfied, in a Delta growl backed with a whining electric slide guitar, he couldn't imagine it pleasing anyone. "What's he saying?" he asked. "Who's going to buy that?"
Fortunately, his partner in Aristocrat, Evelyn Arons, suggested that some of the black southerners who had moved north in search of jobs might enjoy the sounds of home. So Chess pressed 3,000 singles, they sold out in a day, and six decades later Waters's recording is remembered as the first masterpiece of electric Chicago blues.

In a movie – and there have been several based on this story – Chess would have instantly seen the light and devoted himself to creating further blues masterpieces. But in real life he was not a patron of the arts; he was a businessman trying to cut popular hits. By 1950 Arons had been replaced by Leonard's brother Phil and the label was called Chess, but most of its releases continued to be by jazz saxophonists.

Meanwhile Waters was also trying to reach a broader audience, adding a drummer and harmonica player to his live shows to create a tight, tough band. He was frustrated when Chess refused to mess with a winning formula and insisted that he keep making stark guitar-and-bass records like Rollin Stone, a one-chord chant that was archaic even by the standards of rural Mississippi. Neither of them could have imagined that a dozen years later five lads in London would like that record enough to name a band after it.
That is the paradox of the Chess story. The brothers were not musical visionaries; they were small-time "indie" record men making a quick buck from the poorest, least respected people in America. But their cheaply recorded, bread-and-butter discs of local street musicians and bar bands still sound as fresh today as they did 60 years ago. By failing to be timely, they succeeded in being timeless.

They were also lucky, and unusually loyal to their artists. That loyalty did not prevent them from playing some tricky games with publishing and royalty payments, but it meant that down-home bluesmen like Waters and Howlin' Wolf continued to make records long after other indie labels had switched to a trendy teen style called rock'n'roll.

Leonard Chess and Waters had a particularly close relationship, and it served both of them well. When Waters finally persuaded Chess to record his full band, he incidentally brought the label its biggest blues hit-maker: Little Walter was barely out of his teens, and reshaped the course of blues harmonica by amplifying his instrument and playing it like a jazz saxophone. It was a fresh, hip sound, and in 1952 he cut an instrumental called Juke that stayed at the top of the R&B charts for eight weeks. Then, in 1955, Waters introduced Chess to an unknown songwriter from St Louis named Chuck Berry. In retrospect, the list of artists who were associated with Chess in that first decade forms a pantheon of electric blues and blues-influenced rock'n'roll: Waters, Wolf, Walter, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Berry, Bo Diddley. There were some startling one-offs as well: In 1951, a teenage Ike Turner recorded a romping boogie-woogie called Rocket 88 at Sun Studios in Memphis, soon to be the birthplace of rockabilly – but Sam Phillips had not yet started the record label that would spawn Elvis Presley, so the disc appeared on Chess. When Presley hit, Chess got its own white rock'n'rollers, Dale Hawkins and Bobby Charles. Many of the label's biggest hits in this period came from doo-wop groups.
When people talk about the "Chess sound", though, they are not thinking of rockabilly or doo-wop, or even of the brilliant soul records the label produced in the 1960s with Etta James, Fontella Bass and Little Milton. They are thinking of the stripped-down blues discs that, despite changing fashions, always remained among the label's mainstays.