![]() The walls of the Blue Front are covered with faded posters and snapshots of the Bentonia Blues Festival, which Holmes has run for five decades. The Blue Front Cafe in Bentonia, Mississippi in 2013. Behind the cinderblock façade and barred front doors, locals mosey in to buy cigarettes and sundries, lingering sometimes to talk to the proprietor, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes.Īt 74, Holmes is not only an elder statesman – he’s also the last of the Bentonia bluesmen. The Blue Front Café, considered the oldest juke operating in Mississippi, still stands next to the tracks in the center of town. ![]() The only thing riding these rails are freighters headed north and south on the same tracks that dropped Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in Chicago. Like many former farming outposts across the South, Bentonia is bisected by a railroad whose trains don’t bother stopping anymore. felt he himself was performing at a much, much higher level, which may or may not be true, depending on how you look at it Dick Watermanīentonia, Mississippi, sits atop the hills that rise above the vast alluvial Delta, where blues music evolved at sharecropper plantations and juke joints, makeshift venues where laborers could find music and moonshine. He definitely was not ‘one of the guys.’” "He felt he himself was performing at a much, much higher level, which may or may not be true, depending on how you look at it. “In other words, Skip had a huge ego and he loved to be flattered, and the best way to get along with Skip was to be flattering and tell him how great he was. “He was a very different, difficult, contrary kind of person,” Waterman says. “But in the Bentonia style, it’s a minor chord, where major notes get added on top, so the tension between the major and minor is inverted.” “In other regional styles of Delta blues, you may have an open-tuned guitar where the minor gets introduced against the major chord,” says Ryan Lee Crosby, a Massachusetts-based blues artist who learned Bentonia blues from Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, the last living musical link to James. The tuning was so particular that it became associated with Bentonia, Mississippi, James’ hometown, through a succession of players. Instead of the more commonly used open-G and open-E major-key tunings, James played in a D-minor tuning, which lent songs like “Hard Time Killing Floor” and “Cypress Grove” an ominous tone. It’s safe to say no one else at Newport was playing blues guitar the way James did at the time – not House and not White, who were also on the bill in 1964. Skip at Newport ’64 was just transcendent. “He sat down and he set his fingers down on the fretboard, and he took a breath and hit the first note of ‘Devil Got My Woman,’ and it was just incredible.
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