A journey to one of the last juke joints
The Blue Front Cafe: A landmark surrounded by the very landscape where ‘America’s music’ was born
W e’re about 20 miles from Bentonia, Mississippi, and there are already butterflies in my stomach as we roll south on Highway 49. The same paved surface that, about 115 miles to the north, runs into Highway 61. The very crossroads where, in 1930, a 19-year-old Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil for the ability to play the blues like no other.
While the validity of that story will be debated until the end of time, the fact is the origin of the blues can be traced back to this very region — the plains of the Mississippi Delta, between the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers. THIS is the very soil where slaves birthed blues music while working in the cotton fields. Where people gathered to share the blues in the hundreds of tiny juke joints that informally sprung up across the state and the south during prohibition and through the middle part of the 1900s. These are the same roads where musicians began their migration north to spread the Mississippi blues to Chicago, Detroit and beyond.
As the miles on my GPS count down … 19, 18, 17, 16, 15 … the emotions continue to build. Not a nervousness, but rather the weight of a huge piece of American history — and not necessarily a pretty one. The slavery. The human brutality. The raw fingers and scorching sun. The poverty.
From all of it rose a music that’s so drenched in emotion and authenticity that it projects stories not often found in history books. A sound that laid the foundation for what eventually became rock n’ roll. A music that, to this day, serves as the very deepest root of American music.
My thirst to not just soak up the landscape, but to stand in the presence of a slice of disappearing history swells. Bentonia isn’t just a frozen-in-time, dusty speck on the map that 350 Mississippians call home. It’s home to the Blue Front Cafe, the oldest surviving juke joint in Mississippi. And, by several accounts, one of just five or six remaining juke joints left in the country. What’s more, this “if-these-walls-could-talk” landmark continues to be operated by 74-year-old Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, the last living Bentonia-style bluesman.
My heart races as I spot the Blue Front Cafe in the shadows of the nearby Illinois Central Railroad. A one-room, cinder block building with the visual power to instantly transport you back to the infancy of the blues. The official Mississippi Blues Trail marker stands out front, but that’s the only modern anything, anywhere in sight. Flaking paint. Bent, rusty poles holding up an awning over the small front porch. And a gravel parking lot, shared with what used to be a bustling cotton gin next door.
When asked about Mississippi and the blues, American singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt once said:
“There’s nothing like actually going to the place. It really gets in your blood. You can understand why this music came out like it did.”
I feel every bit of that as I step out of the car to snap the photo above. The significance of it all brings a tear to my eye. Not just because the Blue Front Cafe and the spirit of the Mississippi Delta unlocked an opportunity for me to feel the history of the blues in a way I always longed for. But because this exact spot serves as the home base of the last living Bentonia-style bluesman — a unique style of blues that uses haunting minor chords, often played on the guitar in open E or D minor.
It’s as if I’m standing on the ground of a soon-to-be extinct language. And that carries an almost indescribable feeling of reverence and responsibility.
Sparking a lifelong fascination
This visit, on Tuesday, June 14, 2022, was three decades in the making. Growing up just south of Chicago, my fascination with the blues was sparked at the 1992 Chicago Blues Festival at the age of 18. Multiple stages spread throughout Grant Park, with the Chicago skyline immediately to the west and Lake Michigan immediately to the east was magical in itself. But throw in live performances by Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Albert Collins, Jimmy Dawkins, Honeyboy Edwards, Satan & Adam, and others over the course of a single weekend, and I was hooked.
But the time I spent perusing the seemingly endless sea of tents and booths that weekend — and at the next seven-consecutive Chicago Blues Festivals — unlocked my thirst for understanding how this magical genre of music came to be. The more I thumbed through the racks upon racks of blues CDs, liner notes and books— and read through the musician bios in the festival program between sets, the more I saw the word, Mississippi. Even the great Muddy Waters — nicknamed King of the Chicago Blues — migrated from Mississippi.
Until that point, Mississippi had been a void in my mind — a place I knew nothing about, and never heard anyone talk about. That hatched 30 years of diving into the history, conditions and people that made Mississippi the birthplace of the blues, and its role in inspiring so many of the other genres of music that have fueled the timeline of my life. Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Charley Patton, Mississippi Fred McDowell, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, Mississippi John Hurt … the list goes on and on. All native Mississippians and legendary torchbearers for the sound that Mississippi blues and juke joint enthusiast Roger Stolle so perfectly describes as, “the voice of a culture, the soundtrack of a people.”
A new perspective
My family’s move from Minneapolis to Northwest Arkansas in 2007 created an access to this fascinating history that I hadn’t had before. Every so often, we plan a summer vacation to Orange Beach, Alabama, and the drive from Northwest Arkansas to Orange Beach goes straight through Mississippi.
While my entire family is always excited to get to the beach, my soul begins stirring with excitement months before each trip, with thoughts of snapping photos of the magical, yet often-ignored Mississippi landscape along the way — at the idea of rolling down the car windows and absorbing whatever bluesy serenade may still be seeping out of the soil and into the Delta air.
On this particular family vacation road trip to Orange Beach, I intentionally routed us one hour out of our way, directly through Bentonia. I’d read about the Blue Front Cafe in Stolle’s book, Mississippi Juke Joint Confidential, and New York Times best seller Dispatches From Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta, by Richard Grant. And the oldest juke joint on the planet received a jolt of attention in 2021, as its keeper, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, became the most unlikely Grammy nominee when Cypress Grove (produced by Dan Auerbach) was up for Blues Album of the Year. He may not have won, but the nomination created a shot of exposure for the Bentonia style of blues … and put me on the doorstep of the Blue Front Cafe.
Stepping inside
The day I arrived, there was no live music, as folks were preparing for the annual Bentonia Blues Festival — of which the Blue Front Cafe’s porch serves as one of the stages. Jimmy was off helping with planning and arrangements, but that hardly put a damper on my visit. Stepping inside the front door was like stepping back in time. An old wood-fired stove to heat the joint during the winter months. A scattering of tables and chairs across the floor. A handful of guitars on the wall, beside a dusty juke box in the back corner. A fascinating collection of old, faded gig posters … random photographs curling from the heat, and newspaper clippings from stories on Jimmy and the venue itself covered much of the walls. And the old counter to the left, where Jimmy’s parents undoubtedly spent countless days and nights serving guests at the joint.
History of the Blue Front Cafe
According to Mississippi Blues Trail records, Carey and Mary Holmes opened the Blue Front Cafe in 1948. It quickly became a favorite gathering spot for crowds of workers from the Yazoo County cotton fields. It offered groceries, hot meals — often buffalo fish and moonshine whiskey — and even haircuts for a period of time. Due to a tangled set of rules during the segregation era, the cafe was subject to a 10 p.m. town curfew. But at the height of cotton gathering and ginning season, it was known to remain open 24 hours to accommodate people working all shifts.
Like a growing number of juke joints across Mississippi and the south, when the sun went down, the blues tended to take over at the Blue Front Cafe, especially on the weekends. Music at the cafe was often impromptu and unannounced, seldom booked in advance or advertised. It was not uncommon for harmonica players and guitarists traveling through Mississippi to stop in and play a few tunes. But Bentonia also had a cast of homegrown notables like Skip James, Jack Owens, Henry Stuckey, Sonny Boy Williamson №2 and James “Son” Thomas, who gave birth to what became known as the Bentonia-style blues.
Bentonia-style blues
Scholars of the blues trace the Bentonia style to Henry Stuckey, born at the end of the 19th century. According to an interview in 1965, the year before he died, Stuckey said he’d begun tuning his guitar according to the style of a group of Black soldiers from the Caribbean he met while serving with the U.S. Army in France during World War I.
Stuckey was a farm laborer and lived in Little Yazoo, Satarita and other nearby communities before he and his family moved in on the Holmes family farm in Bentonia for a few years in the mid-1950s. Several sources say Stuckey would entertain the Holmes children by playing his unique style of the blues on Friday and Saturday nights — and that’s where young Jimmy got hooked.
While Stuckey left no recorded music behind, he passed his songs and playing style on to a handful of others, including Skip James, considered the best-known blues artist from Bentonia. He recorded a handful of songs for Paramount Records in 1931, but was so discouraged by the lack of pay that he stopped performing altogether and fell out of the limelight. But, as one source put it, “interest in those scratchy 78 rpm records eventually grew,” and 30 years later James performed for an audience of 15,000 people at the Newport Folk Festival.
By all accounts, James’ performance was the talk of Newport — his hypnotic style of acoustic Bentonia blues being the perfect counterpoint to the more urban, electric blues of such stars as B.B. King and John Lee Hooker. James recorded a few albums, as did fellow Bentonia resident Jack Owens. They and others spread what Stuckey had begun up and down the Delta, between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. And, eventually, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, who took over the Blue Front Cafe from his parents in 1970, picked up the torch.
The blues live on
To this day, Jimmy operates the Blue Front Cafe, showing up almost every morning to unlock the doors, serve food and drinks to patrons, and carry on its tradition as an informal, down-home blues juke joint. Jimmy plays regularly at the venue — sometimes for a handful of locals, and other times for a room full of visitors from across the country and all over the world, who want to experience the blues in its natural habitat.
The Blue Front Cafe is my definition of perfection — a powerfully important tie to a disappearing part of our country’s history. To the voice of a culture. To the soundtrack of a people. A landmark amongst the very landscape where America’s music was born.
