Blue Front Bentonia Blues
Grant Britt
Posted On June 20, 2016
If you like your blues evil, down and dirty, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes is your man. Some call it country blues, but the country reflected here is a barren landscape Skip James frequented, down in Bentonia Mississippi. The open minor tuning in D or E gives the music a droning, mournful feel.
Holmes parents owned and operated Bentonia’s Blue Front Cafe in ’41, and Holmes took over the operation in 1970 and still runs it. Veteran Bentonia Bluesmen Henry Stuckey, who lived next door, and Jack Owen, a freuquent performer at the Cafe, taught Holmes to play, and Holmes will pass along that favor if he likes you when you stop by to listen.
Recorded in the Blue Front cafe with only Holmes voice, guitar, and harp, it’s a stark tutorial on an art form that’s nearly extinct. Former Bonnie Raitt manager and renowned music photographer Dick Waterman(Between Midnight And Day), who also started the first blues booking agency representing Skip James, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Junior Wells as early clients, partnered with Holmes to form Blue Front Records.
The music reeks of hard times, lost women, lost wages and often a little unwanted help from a lower power. “It Had to Be The Devil” explores the proposition that it couldn’t have been any fault of his own that ran his woman off, but the devil that made her change her mind.
With a title like “So Glad,” you’d think that the gloom had lifted at last. Baby’s coming back home, and even though Holmes admits it’s something to shout about and that he ain’t never felt this good before, the tone is still somber, the minor tuning giving a feeling that something bad’s about to happen to spoil everything.
Sure enough, on the next song, Holmes gives her a warning: “Slow Down,” he tells his newly arrived beloved, you need to change your ways before sumpin’ bad happens to you and you end up in an early grave. As he comes to the last verse, a train roars by, adding to the mournful tone as its lonesome whistle howls a warning as the locomotive barrels through the crossing.
It’s not easy listening music. It’s stark reality that cuts to the bone, a real portrait of everyday life where everybody has to scuffle for a living and pleasures are hard to come by. The pleasure here is the capturing for posterity of a disappearing art form and the man who’s doing his best to keep it breathing.
