Louisiana and Mississippi long shared a close musical relationship, with one of the most important routes running between Natchez and Ferriday, where African American businessman Will Haney operated Haney’s Big House for several decades. The club featured major national blues and R&B acts as well as local musicians including Ferriday’s Leon “Pee Wee” Whittaker and Natchez’s Hezekiah Early and Y. Z. Ealey, and a young Jerry Lee Lewis often visited to absorb the sound of the blues. More broadly, musicians regularly crossed between the neighboring states, with New Orleans players traveling to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, Mississippi Delta artists performing in Louisiana clubs, and record labels in Shreveport, Crowley, Jackson, and New Orleans recording artists from both states. Ferriday’s major contribution to this interchange came through Haney’s Big House on 4th Street, later East Wallace Boulevard, run by Will Haney, who bought the property in March 1945 and also operated a hotel behind the club. In its heyday the club had about fifty tables, served food around the clock, and hosted performers including B. B. King, Little Milton, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Roy Brown, Solomon Burke, Percy Mayfield, Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Johnnie Taylor, and Irma Thomas. Whittaker, a trombonist from Newellton, Louisiana, led the house band there in the 1950s and hosted a radio show on KFNV, while house bands were also led by Natchez natives Y. Z. Ealey and Hezekiah Early, who had earlier played the club with guitarist John Fitzgerald and singer Elmo Williams.