The Hollywood Café, first in Hollywood, Mississippi, and later at this site in Robinsonville, became famous as a Delta dining institution and a gathering place in the area's musical history. Son House performed here when the building was the commissary of the Frank Harbert plantation, where he once lived, and Robinsonville resident Phoebie Taylor recalled him also playing at the B. F. Harbert commissary and at houses, stores, and filling stations in town. House often played with Willie Brown, and the local blues circle included Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin, Leroy Williams, Woodrow Adams, Willie Coffee, and Sol Henderson; Taylor also said Wolf sometimes played at his aunt Lula Prince’s house on the Harbert plantation. The café began in the summer of 1969 when Bard Selden opened it as a bar without live music or a kitchen, then gradually expanded its menu to include steak, catfish, and its signature fried dill pickles while adding dinnertime music. Bob Hall later bought the business, brought in pianist Muriel Wilkins, and also featured the Turnrow Cowboys; after a fire destroyed the Hollywood on August 27, 1983, the Owen family bought it from Hall and reopened it in Robinsonville, and John Almond and Michael Young acquired it in 2006. Wilkins, an African American schoolteacher from Helena, Arkansas, performed for years at both Hollywood locations with a repertoire ranging from standards to spirituals, and after Marc Cohn joined her in singing “Amazing Grace” and other spirituals there one night in 1985, he drew on the experience for “Walking in Memphis,” the hit from his 1991 debut album. In June 1973, BBC television used the Hollywood as the setting for blues performances on The Friendly Invasion, filming Robert “Bilbo” Walker, Big Jack Johnson, Sam Carr, and a Memphis group led by Joe Willie Wilkins with Houston Stackhouse, Sonny “Harmonica” Blakes, Melvin Lee, and Homer Jackson. Both Hollywood buildings had originally been plantation commissaries, the first on the Tate Place, where Son House was living at the time of the 1940 census, and Nolan Struck later became another blues and soul figure in Robinsonville. Another notable blues event at the Hollywood took place on November 9, 2007, when B.B. King and Governor Haley Barbour attended a ceremony at which AT&T presented a $500,000 donation to the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, with performances by Jesse Robinson and Homemade Jamz.
