The Ramkat at Seven: How a Dead Nightclub Became the Triad's Living Room

There's a version of Winston-Salem history where the corner at 170 W. Ninth Street just stays dark. Ziggy's — the beloved, chaotic, indispensable club that anchored the city's Entertainment District for decades — closed, and the building sat there being a building. Instead, in January 2018, veteran promoters Richard Emmett and Andy Tennille announced they'd reopen the space as The Ramkat, with Airtype Studios and Camel City Goods owner Bryan Ledbetter on as a partner. Eight years later it is, without much argument, the most important mid-size room in the Triad.

The numbers explain part of it. The main hall holds roughly 1,000, big enough to land a national touring act but small enough that the back wall still feels like part of the show. The sightlines are genuinely good — a low bar that a shocking number of clubs this size trip over — and the room adapts, folk one night and metal the next without feeling like it's cosplaying either. Upstairs, Gas Hill seats about 100, the designated home for the songwriter-and-a-hush bookings that would drown in the big room.

But capacity isn't why people talk about the Ramkat like it's theirs. It's the booking philosophy, which reads as: serve the region, not just the tour routing. The Wallflowers and Melissa Etheridge have played the main stage; so have Winston-Salem's own. The calendar refuses to specialize.

Look at what's coming. This month closes with a genuine event — Winston-Salem native and hip-hop titan 9th Wonder headlining July 31 (we'll have plenty to say about that homecoming). Then August turns into a clinic on range: country royalty Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives on the 14th, Texas troubadour Robert Earl Keen on the 18th, indie favorites The Brook & The Bluff with Victoria Victoria on the 19th, and roots-soul act The Wood Brothers with Ric Robertson on the 26th. Four bookings, four different Americas, one room. That's not an accident; that's a thesis.

What the Ramkat quietly proved is that a city of Winston-Salem's size can sustain a serious, independently run club if the people running it actually live there and take the region personally. It gives back locally, courts Triad partnerships, and treats the old Ziggy's ghost not as a burden but as a mandate: this corner is supposed to have music in it.

Here's the part the Triad shouldn't undersell. Cities twice this size lost their signature independent room in the 2010s and never got it back. Winston-Salem lost one and replaced it with something arguably more durable — a club that can flip from a listening-room whisper to a 1,000-capacity roar and back inside a week. In a state that keeps its music-town credentials concentrated in three or four zip codes, the Ramkat is a standing argument that the map is drawn too small.

Seven years in, the room that used to be a shrine to what Winston-Salem had is now proof of what it kept. Go stand in it before the summer's out. Ninth Street would tell you to.

Sources: Veteran promoters to re-open the old Ziggy's as the Ramkat — Triad City Beat; Winston-Salem Live Music Guide; Events — The Ramkat