The Summers Hotel was located in

Jackson, Mississippi Jackson, officially the City of Jackson, is the Capital city, capital of and the List of municipalities in Mississippi, most populous city in the U.S. state of Mississippi. The city is also one of two county seats of Hinds County, Mississippi, ...

, United States, and was the city's first black-owned hotel. W. J. Summers established it in 1944 and many black musicians lodged there during the era of

segregation Segregation may refer to: Separation of people * Geographical segregation, rates of two or more populations which are not homogenous throughout a defined space * School segregation * Housing segregation * Racial segregation, separation of humans ...

. The Subway Lounge was opened in the basement in 1966. The Subway was a regular

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...

venue and offered popular late-night

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

shows from the mid-1980s until the hotel's demolition in 2004. The Subway Lounge was featured in the 2003

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional film, motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". Bill Nichols (film critic), Bil ...

, ''Last of the Mississippi Jukes''. It has a marker as part of the

Mississippi Blues Trail The Mississippi Blues Trail was created by the Mississippi Blues Commission in 2006 to place interpretive markers at the most notable historical sites related to the birth, growth, and influence of the blues throughout (and in some cases beyond) t ...

References

Buildings and structures in Hinds County, Mississippi Hotels in Mississippi Mississippi Blues Trail Music venues completed in 1966 Hotel buildings completed in 1944 Demolished buildings and structures in Mississippi Buildings and structures demolished in 2004 African-American history of Mississippi {{HindsCountyMS-geo-stub