By Charlie Matthews

I recently had the opportunity to spend the weekend in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, home of the University of Southern Mississippi and home to a huge music scene. You know the indie music scene at a college is big when the college has a student-ran recording studio on campus (South City Records), and this small college town is no exception. So I was pretty excited to be heading to Hattiesburg, because college towns are usually guaranteed to provide good radio stations, small guitar shops, and mom-and-pop owned records stores.

T-Bones Records and Cafe is just one of those mom-and-pop shops that I am more than willing to visit and spend time in. The collection of vinyl in this shop was over the top. I visited with friends and family, and we had a blast calling out favorites from today and the past. It was fun to look at the cover art and discuss bands like Molly Hatchet, Prince, The Clash, Big Star, and The White Stripes. We wanted to put everything on the turntable, and we all became cover-art critics. This is what happens when you go to a shop that lets you have fun, and T-Bones let us explore, like children in a candy shop.

Now T-Bones isn’t a Tower Records with a huge inventory and a three-story corner spot in a major city. It is a small town shop with a great inventory. What they lack in quantity, they more than make up for in quality. There was so much to choose from in almost every music genre. I personally flipped through LPs, Cassettes and CD’s from grunge, to Motown, to the real old R&B, right up into new releases from bands I barely new and couldn’t quite put my finger on. If you look back at that last sentence, I mentioned cassettes. If you haven’t heard, cassettes are making a resurgence. Not as strongly as vinyl is, but if you happen to find a cassette player at a garage sale, you might want to add it back to your stereo setup.

Before coming to the record store, we had eaten breakfast at a local bakery, so we weren’t quite up to eating again at the cafe. But there was a steady flow of people coming and going with sandwiches and coffee. People were hanging out listening to tunes, from the shops playlist, surfing the internet, or doing their homework (we can only suppose) in the cafe area. The laid back atmosphere and hospitality from the T-Bones staff really went a long way in making this shop a place to make a morning of. I could have easily sat down with my laptop to write this article and not felt as though I was overstaying my welcome.

Needless to say, I really enjoyed T-Bones Records and Cafe. They are set up to meet the needs of people just getting into the vinyl thing as well as the seasoned collector. There is a little bit of everything to help cover your music listening needs. They also sell headphones, record players, t-shirts, and books, but that isn’t their niche. Where T-Bones shines is in their music selection and hospitality. The staff let us be to enjoy ourselves. They also took the time to answer our questions on gear, bands, styles, and, of course, the comeback of cassettes and how that relates to the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’re in Hattiesburg and you need to fill up some time, this is a really good shop to do it in!