The Harlem Inn, known as “The Showplace of the South,” was a premier Delta nightclub built in 1939 by local African American farmer Hezekiah Patton, Sr., who developed it after first operating a smaller club in Winstonville and after a new Highway 61 route brought opportunity to this site. Launched, according to Patton family lore, with twenty-five dollars from his uncle James Patton, a successful club owner in Shelby, the Harlem Inn became one of the state’s leading venues on an elite circuit of black nightclubs and halls. Business boomed in the 1940s and 1950s as patrons from towns across the Delta came by train for Saturday night shows, stayed overnight, and returned home the next day. Named for Harlem in New York City but apparently unrelated to other similarly named Mississippi clubs, it hosted many major blues and rhythm and blues performers, including B. B. King, Little Milton, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Howlin’ Wolf, Tyrone Davis, T-Bone Walker, Ray Charles, Little Willie John, Percy Mayfield, Ivory Joe Hunter, Big Joe Turner, Jackie Wilson, the Impressions, Bobby Rush, Joe Poonanny, and Delta acts such as Little Wynn, the White Family, and T. J. and the Hurricanes. Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm gave some of their earliest performances there, and he later returned in the 1960s with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. After Hezekiah Patton’s death, Lamar Crowder rented the club for several years, and in the early 1970s Patton’s sons Robert, Charles, and Hezekiah, Jr., with their mother Ruby, carried on its tradition of packed shows that sometimes drew five to six hundred people, more than the population of Winstonville. The Harlem Inn stood here until a fire destroyed it in May 1989, just before its fiftieth anniversary, after which Robert Patton recalled Little Milton’s words that Hezekiah Patton had put a blues monument in Winstonville and that Winstonville would never be the same.