Po' Monkey's Lounge — The Last Juke Joint

Willie Seaberry ran Po' Monkey's from 1963 until he was found dead on July 14, 2016. The shack was sharecroppers' quarters — tin and plywood held together by nails, staples, and wires, loosely fashioned and made by Seaberry himself. He lined the low ceilings with Christmas lights, naked baby dolls, street signs, wrapping paper, disco balls, and dozens of stuffed-animal monkeys. Outside he posted a sign: "No Loud Music, No Dope Smoking, No Rap Music."

In its earlier years, Po' Monkey's was an incubator for the Delta Blues scene. Birney Imes featured the club in his 1990 book *Juke Joint*. By the 1990s it drew college students from Delta State University in Cleveland, blues pilgrims, and people who wanted to see what a juke joint actually felt like. Seaberry was best known for his colorful suits — he would change several times a night, sometimes adding humorous or sexually charged items. The crowd got raunchier as the decades turned: provocative dancing, strippers, $2 cans of beer.

Annie Leibovitz photographed it in 2000. In 2009 the Mississippi Blues Commission placed a historic marker at Po' Monkey's, designating it as a site on the Mississippi Blues Trail. In May 2014, Anthony Bourdain featured it on *Parts Unknown*. Richard Grant's 2015 book *Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta* put a photo of the juke joint on its cover. By then it was one of the last rural juke joints in the Mississippi Delta.

Seaberry held a life estate in the property — he owned it during his lifetime, and upon his death, the land reverted to the Hiter family. Billy Nowell, the mayor of nearby Cleveland at the time, called Seaberry a "positive influence" on Bolivar County. Po' Monkey's ceased operating after his death. In 2018 the contents were sold at auction to Shonda Warner, a former Clarksdale resident who had frequented the joint. The night it held is gone.