February 16, 2022

Jimmy "Duck" Holmes - 2003 Gonna Get Old Someday (2008)

The last of the Bentonians

Jimmy ‘"Duck" Holmes is the only known surviving practitioner of an endangered blues tradition, the "Bentonia blues", a style born in and around the small Mississippi town of Bentonia (read below). It is said that this unique style of blues was "invented" by Henry Stuckey (1897-1966) who learned an open E minor guitar tuning from black Bahamian soldiers while serving in France during World War I. Returning home, he incorporated and extended this type of tuning to his playing, eventually showing it to Skip James (1902-1969) and Jack Owens (1904-1997).

Holmes never met Skip James who left Bentonia when he was a child, but learned from Jack Owens, who ran a weekend juke-joint in town for most of his life. He became a frequent visitor to the Blue Front Cafe (read below), another juke-joint operated by Holmes's parents, and set himself to transmit the Bentonia blues style to Holmes who learned by watching and listening Owens play, both being unable to read or write music.

Different from the nearby Hill Country blues style, though there are some similarities, the Bentonia blues distinctive "secret" is its use of Open E minor and Open D minor tuning which gives the music a unique mournful, listless tonality, largely confined to the past until Holmes started to record again. Again because the famous and inexhaustible Library of Congress ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax had already recorded a few samples of his songs in the 1970s.

"Gonna Get Old Someday", released in 2008 but recorded in 2003, is in fact Holmes' first album chronologically. Holmes offers twelve tracks of plain, relatively repetitive and monotone country blues that is at the same time ethereal, gritty and rough, even crude, but amazingly beautiful in its simplicity and raw expressiveness. This hypnotic album is a form of bare musical catharsis impossible to resist. It takes the listener back to the origins of blues, to its very essence.

Thanks to the Duck, now 74, the Bentonia blues style is surviving. Let's hope that like Holmes did from Owens, some young bluesmen will take on the torch from him before it's too late. In the meantime the Bentonia style would deserve to receive the Unesco's Intangible Cultural Heritage label.

Bentonia and the Blue Front Cafe

 Located on the South-East edge of the Delta, about 20 miles north of Jackson, Bentonia is a small half deserted town of not more than 400 residents today. It takes the form of a crossroad occupied by a few scattered business services, farm-houses and ancient warehouses and cotton gins. Its location on the Illinois Central Railway used to draw numerous visitors, but today, if the train still runs through town daily, it doesn't stop anymore, and a nearby four-lane highway diverts traffic away from Bentonia. Most of the businesses of Holmes' youth have shuttered, buildings have been torn down, and more than a quarter of the residents live under the poverty line. But for blues lovers, there's a mythical place in town.

On a dead end dusty road along the railroad tracks stands a kind of shotgun house with a blue painted front side : the judiciously named Blue Front Cafe, the first Afro-American-owned business in Bentonia when Holmes' parents, who were sharecroppers, opened it in 1948, a year after he was born. It was then a gathering spot much appreciated by field hands from the surrounding cotton plantations where they could eat and drink a home-made bootleg Moonshine while tasting some good ol' Bentonia blues.

Nowadays, the place still looks voluntarily vintage. Holmes keeps it simple, like it was when he became the owner in 1970 after his father’s death. Inside, the walls are decorated with Holmes' retired guitars and posters from festivals where he has performed, a few tables and chairs, a jukebox, a counter and in a corner some guitars free for a try by tourists… Blues lover visitors come from far to visit this "monument" officially part of the Mississippi Blues Trail, and Holmes never refuses to play a couple of blues when politely asked for...


Worth reading
> Bluesman Toby Walker's account of his visit to Jack Owens in Bentonia : https://www.littletobywalker.com/jack-owens.html
Interviews
> During the 2017 Baton Rouge Blues Festival: https://youtu.be/GeTl4iMGcQ4
> For Live@Blues On The Hill  at The Blue Front Cafe in 2019: https://youtu.be/wpY2cLxigJ0
> For the Italian Web Channel Il Blues Magazine in 2013 during the Rootsway Festival 2013 in Correggio: https://youtu.be/pUi1urmS3d8
 
Videos 
 
1) At the Blue Front Cafe
> Short documentary about Jimmy 'Duck' Holmes and the Blue Front Cafe: https://youtu.be/kchRF1tRYDc
> "Refuse to fold", part of a documentary by Brian Dempsey and Angela Smith about heritage tourism and the Mississippi Delta Blues, featuring Jimmy "Duck" Holmes from Bentonia: https://youtu.be/s3xTsum1Jj4

> Visit to the  Blue Front Cafe
> Jamming with R. L. Boyce and Miss Australia before the Bentonia Blues Festival 2019: https://youtu.be/Cr2-licMlbA & https://youtu.be/VOVgc-QhxME
> During the Bentonia Blues Festival 2021, feat. Jimmy "Duck" Holmes, Deak Harp, Lightnin Malcolm, R.L. Boyce and more, in front of the Blue Front Cafe: https://youtu.be/cBTYh98ihYQ


2) At festivals
> At the Bentonia Blues Festival
> At the New Orleans Crescent City Blues & BBQ Festival 2016 (full 57mn set): https://youtu.be/hup93Uawuyo
> At the Juke Joint Festival 2011 in Clarksdale: https://youtu.be/-9ybD-aUIF4
> On the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise: https://youtu.be/pTwyiScrya4 & https://youtu.be/SCPJXRuKUBc
 
 About Jack Owens
> With his old accomplice Benjamin "Blind Bud" Spires (harmonica) , shot by Alan Lomax, Worth Long and John Bishop at Jack Owens' farm near Bentonia, in 1978: https://youtu.be/usA-3HDRLXE
 
 







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