Bentonia blues
Bentonia, Mississippi
Bluesman Jimmy “Duck” Holmes is the greatest living proponent of the Bentonia blues, a highly localized style known for its haunting and eerie sound. Some have dubbed him “the last” master of this distinctive style, but his dedication to preserving and passing on his knowledge, his award-winning recent recordings, and his electrifying stage performances are building a renaissance for the unique music that bears the name of his tiny Mississippi hometown.
Bentonia blues came to international attention in 1964, when the legendary Skip James was among the leading figures of the blues revival featured at the Newport Folk Festival. James learned the style from its progenitor, Henry Stuckey, who developed it using tuning learned from Caribbean musicians he met while serving in the U.S. Army in France during World War I. These tunings, based around open D minor and open E minor, give Bentonia blues an ethereal, even ominous, feel. The style is notably improvised and intricate, even when building from the best-known songs in the blues canon. Jimmy “Duck” Holmes first heard the music as a child sitting on the porch with Stuckey, who was his parents’ tenant in the 1950s. Later Holmes developed his own musical chops playing in his family’s juke joint, the Blue Front, with Jack Owens, the other great Stuckey protégé of Skip James’s generation.
Mary and Carey Holmes opened the Blue Front in 1948, when Jimmy was only a year old. He’s been the proprietor since 1970, when his father passed away. It’s now a designated stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail, in recognition of its status as the oldest continuously operating juke joint in Mississippi and, some claim, the entire United States. An unassuming yet lovingly tended building in rural Bentonia (current population around 300) on the southern edge of the Delta, it draws a diverse cast of local people and blues tourists from as far away as Europe and Japan to the sessions Holmes kicks off every weekend. Some return to study the style from the master himself. He also continues the tradition he started with his mother Mary of hosting the annual Bentonia Blues Festival, which just celebrated its 50th anniversary. It’s a huge endeavor Holmes hosts on his family farm as a free celebration for the community he loves.
Although Jimmy “Duck” Holmes’ daily life revolves around the Blue Front, recently fame has come knocking. He has toured and recorded since the early 2000s, and his 2006 debut brought multiple Living Blues awards. Then in 2019, superstar producer Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys proposed a collaboration. “I like to work with people who inspire me, and Jimmy inspires me,” Auerbach explains. “Jimmy’s music is rough and tumble, and it can shatter a lot of preconceptions purists have about Delta blues.” Their sessions in Nashville led to Holmes’s most recent album, Cypress Grove, which earned him his first Grammy nomination. From Bentonia to Richmond, his heart is with the blues, which Holmes calls “the foundation [that] all American music was built on. And it’s the truth—all true stories about real life, ‘cause country blues got no room for lies…. As long as I live, I’m gonna be on a stage somewhere, singing the old-style country blues.”
More about Jimmy is available in Smithsonian Magazine, and the Mississippi Folklife and Folk Artist Directory.