A giant spray-painted truck was parked outside Mizz Nellie’s Soundtrack in early August, blasting tunes from Legit Ballaz: Respect the Game Vol. 3, the latest release on the label run by hometown hip-hop hero Twista. Inside the shop, at 2945 W. Madison, swarms of children were buying candy and CDs, asking the Legit Ballaz crew for autographs, and playing video games. The store’s owner, 46-year-old Nellie Thomas, reminded an unruly eight-year-old girl to be ladylike. The girl immediately quieted down and said, “Yes, mama.”
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Thomas, who was wearing a long apron over her blouse and jeans, usually whips up a soul-food dinner when artists do an in-store promotion–macaroni and cheese, collard greens, fried chicken, baked fish, string beans, banana pudding. Five-time Grammy winner Alicia Keys liked the dinner she got so much that she asks to stop by Mizz Nellie’s each time she swings through the midwest. “Alicia doesn’t come to Chicago without asking about Mizz Nellie,” says Allan Cole, the regional representative for Keys’s label. “And if she doesn’t see her, she wants to know why.”
Before opening her own shop in 1997, Thomas worked seven days a week for nearly a decade at Barney’s One Stop, one of Chicago’s few black-owned music outlets. For a while she also worked nights at the popular west-side mega-indie George’s Music Room. “Talk about a person with no life,” she says. “I felt I wasn’t appreciated enough, so I did my own thing.”
Thomas also keeps trying to come up with new hooks. In February she sold Valentine’s Day baskets filled with romantic CDs, candles, novelty condoms, and the like. Later she sold Easter baskets with CDs. “I still have people asking me about those baskets,” she says. And then there are the soul-food dinners. She’s now considering selling some of the dishes: “The kids are always telling me they’d buy food if I’d sell it.”
