2017: Bentonia Blues at the Blue Front

This story was selected by the Country Roads magazine editorial team as the representative piece for 2017 in the archival project "40 Stories From 40 Years"—celebrating the magazine's 40th anniversary on stands. Click here to read more stories from the project. 

On any given day in Bentonia, Mississippi, tourists from all over the world visit the Blue Front Café. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker stands in front of the café and juke joint that’s stood on this little town’s main street for sixty-nine years.

The Blue Front Café’s owner, blues singer-guitarist Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, keeps his place simple. Tourists seek an authentic juke joint experience. On a recent, especially hot summer day in Bentonia, Holmes received blues pilgrims from Australia, the United Kingdom, California, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. “It’s every day,” he said, sitting at a small table in the café for a recent interview. “They’ll read about this old place and they can’t believe that it’s still here. See, it’s 90 percent original.” 

Guitars, amplifiers, and a jukebox occupy one corner of the café’s concrete floor. Visitors are welcome to play the instruments. “A family from London was here yesterday,” said Holmes. “A husband, a wife, and two kids. The kid could play a little bit. So, he got back there and messed around. They were delighted.”

The café’s interior walls are decorated with guitars that Holmes has “retired” and posters from festivals where he’s performed. There’s a poster for the 2007 Chicago Blues Festival, one of his first performances beyond Mississippi. “Every now and then I’ll throw a little paint in the ceiling, on the wall,” said Holmes, of his maintenance of the café. He also paints the rough-hewn stools that stand alongside the café’s short service counter. “Ooh, they been here!” he said. “When you step in this door, you step back in time.”

Despite the nearly seven decades that the Blue Front Café has featured music, there’s no stage. Musicians play on the floor, level with the patrons. “In the early days, there wasn’t even an amplifier,” remembered Holmes. “Just a guy with an acoustic guitar and a chair and a tip bucket.”

He also paints the rough-hewn stools that stand alongside the café’s short service counter. “Ooh, they been here!” he said. “When you step in this door, you step back in time.”

Holmes doesn’t know how he got the nickname, Duck. He’s had it for as long as he can remember, and all of his siblings have nicknames, too. His parents, Carey and Mary Holmes, opened the Blue Front Café in 1948, when he was a baby. In the 1940s and ’50s, before the rise of mechanized farming, Bentonia was a thriving farm and lumber town. Grocery stores, clothing shops, and farm equipment sellers filled every building in town. The Blue Front Café was busy, too. Holmes’ mother sold hot meals, including buffalo fish, soft drinks, and moonshine. The café featured music, albeit spontaneously, including the distinctive Bentonia blues. “You’d be surprised how many guys could play blues guitar and harmonica,” Holmes recalled. “Sometimes they would compete against one another. Sometimes they would get together and just jam. Back then they didn’t call it a jam. They called it ‘pick the guitar.’ They had no ambition of getting rich or famous. They did it because they were around someone else who was doing it. Just like me. I was around people who could play. I picked it up.”

The Holmes family’s café and eighty-acre farm supported a household including Holmes, his nine siblings, and his four cousins. Naturally, the children worked as field laborers on the farm. From the age of 9, Holmes’ responsibilities included driving tractors and trucks. By 11 or 12, he was driving his mother to the Blue Front Café and farmers’ markets in Yazoo City and Jackson. She’d developed a fear of driving, he explained, after she’d been behind the wheel for an accident. “So, I was her chauffeur,” he said.

Holmes helped his mother run the Blue Front Café. By his late teens, she felt comfortable leaving him to run to day-to-day business. And after his father’s death in 1970, Holmes assumed the café’s management. “I had already been grown into it,” he said.

Connected to the Blue Front Café for nearly seventy years, Holmes’ feelings for it run deep. “It’s been a part of my life all of my life,” he said. “So, the Blue Front is Jimmy Holmes. Jimmy Holmes is the Blue Front. I come here every day. I might not stay all day today, but I come every day. I enjoy it. Because I know somebody is going to come by here, interested in what it looks like, asking, ‘Can I take pictures of it?’ And without this place here, this Blue Front Café, and me, Jimmy ‘Duck’ Holmes, people wouldn’t know where Bentonia is.”

“So, the Blue Front is Jimmy Holmes. Jimmy Holmes is the Blue Front. I come here every day. I might not stay all day today, but I come every day. I enjoy it. Because I know somebody is going to come by here, interested in what it looks like, asking, ‘Can I take pictures of it?’" 

Although Holmes, the best-known modern Bentonia blues musician, and the Blue Front Café are the town’s biggest attractions, Bentonia also has Mississippi Blues Trail markers for two more local blues men, Skip James and Jack Owens. James left Bentonia when Holmes was a child. Owens stayed in his hometown and became a frequent visitor to the Blue Front Café. In the last five or six years of his life, Owens visited the Blue Front Café every day. He made it his mission to pass the distinctive Bentonia style of blues, or the Bentonia School, on to Holmes.

“After Jack’s wife passed, this was his second home,” said Holmes. “Once he got through doing his chores around the house, he came to the Blue Front. He’d play, and I’d watch. He would always tell me, ‘Boy, you got to learn this.’”

[Read this: A new version of blues history is restoring the reputation of women in early blues, including Memphis Minnie.]

Holmes’ learned Owens’ lyrics and guitar parts by watching and listening.

“I never let him know, but it was complicated to learn it,” recalled Holmes. “See, Jack couldn’t read nor write. He realized that he wasn’t educated enough to teach me. So, it came to his mind that he could show me. He would tell me, ‘Just watch my hand.’ ”

Bentonia blues musicians tune the open strings of their guitars to a minor chord. The custom tuning gives the music a mournful, otherworldly quality. “Right, it can be mournful,” said Holmes. “Sometimes it can be happy. Sometimes you sound like you’re way down in the swamp. That’s what makes it so unique.”

So, it came to his mind that he could show me. He would tell me, ‘Just watch my hand.’”

For most of his life, music was a sideline for Holmes. In addition to running the Blue Front Café, he worked for the Yazoo County School District as a parents’ advisor. His  retirement from the school system in 2010 gave Holmes more time to perform and travel. He’s played extensively in the United States, including appearances at the Baton Rouge Blues Festival, New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival in Clarksdale. International touring has taken him to Europe, Canada, and South America.“I enjoy it,” said Holmes, of his late-blooming travels. “Even besides playing the guitar, when I go off, I can enjoy myself sightseeing, meeting people.” He’s happy to bring Bentonia blues to the world. “People are curious about it,” he said. “I appreciate the fact that things I know about the music itself are important to someone else.”

Holmes recorded his latest album, It Is What It Is (winner of the 2017 Living Blues Award for best new traditional-acoustic recording), in the Blue Front Café. Like the juke joint, the album’s production is simple and authentic. As Holmes’ Lafayette-based manager, Michael Schulze, explained, the café’s ceiling fan and cinderblock acoustics and the train that rolls through Bentonia provide mood-setting accompaniment.   

“I always knew the Blue Front was going to be a part of whatever I do,” said Holmes. 

Jimmy “Duck” Holmes will perform at the Bogalusa Blues and Heritage Festival on Saturday, September 29, at 2:30 pm. bogalusablues.com.