From Jimmy King to Eddie Cotton: The Musical Legacy of Jackson's Famed Subway Lounge

The Subway Lounge and Summers Hotel were more than staples. They were signs of commonality, a beacon of what Jackson could look like as a city.

Once upon a time, there was a place in Jackson during the Civil Rights Movement and beyond where people of all walks of life could meet, eat, and drink as they listened to live jazz and blues from some of the best performers in the world. It was a hole-in-the-wall that sold buckets of iced beer to quench patrons’ thirst, and they kept their bellies full with Blues Dogs.

The Subway Lounge and Summers Hotel were a unique historical duo that marked groovy sacred ground for all guests to be safe as they juked the night away. In 1944, W.J. Summers purchased and renovated a formerly whites-only rooming house and turned it into the Summers Hotel, which he ran with his wife Elma. In 1966, Summers enlisted vocalist Jimmy King to run a newly constructed lounge in the hotel basement, which King dubbed the Subway. King ran it with his wife, Helen.

“It ain’t much to look at,” the Greg ‘Fingers’ Taylor would sing in the underground juke joint. “Just a hole in the wall, but every Friday and Saturday night, we’d have ourselves a natural ball.”

Fingers was a harmonica player best known for his work with Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band, but in Jackson, he was known for playing at the Subway along with Mississippi blues legends, such as Patrice Moncell, Bobby Rush, Eddie Rasberry, Sam Myers, J. T. Watkins, Pat Brown, Dennis Fountain, Dwight Ross, Thomas “Snake” Johnson, Vasti Jackson, Bill Sampson, and the Juvenators. Blues singer and bass guitarist Eddie Cotton was blessed to be a part of the jazz and blues scene as a youngster. At 21, Cotton started playing at the Subway with King Edward and The House Rockers.

“If you had a reputation, you could play,” said Cotton of the performers allowed to play on the Subway stage. “Most were recording artists. It wasn’t for roody-poos.”

The Summers Hotel was one of only two hotels Black people could stay in before desegregation. It housed some of the best entertainers in the world, including James Brown, Hank Ballard, and Nat “King” Cole. Despite segregation and the racial tension that followed, Subway had always been where everyone could enjoy a night of musical bliss.

“The Subway is about the only place (in Jackson) where middle-class whites and inner city Blacks can meet with some kind of common humanity,” was quoted in Live Blues magazine when the lounge was still a popular nightlife location that opened on the weekend from midnight to 4 a.m. In 2004, the Summers Hotel and Subway building was demolished.

Author

Crystal McDowell

Crystal McDowell is the CEO of Marketing Maven Management, a marketing and communications firm created to ensure accurate and positive storytelling that includes people of color. She has a Mass Communication degree from Jackson State University and an MBA from Belhaven University. She has 18+ years of journalism, PR, and marketing skills, which she obtained working across the country. Her hobbies are traveling and storytelling.