Jimmy "Duck" Holmes

The final living practitioner of the Bentonia School tradition, Jimmy "Duck" Holmes maintains a spare, spectral approach to the blues while operating the Blue Front Cafe, the nation's oldest continuously running juke joint, situated in his native Bentonia, Mississippi. Carrying forward the regional lineage established by Henry Stuckey and Skip James, Holmes favors open E-minor and D-minor tunings that produce stark, intricate voicings characteristic of this particular strain of country-blues. Although he first handled a guitar in the late 1950s, his professional performing life commenced only during the 1980s and 1990s through appearances at regional blues festivals that later expanded to national and international stages. A handful of early field recordings document his initial years, yet he did not issue an album until the late 2000s, after he had reached his sixties. Once underway, the catalog grew steadily with releases such as the 2007 album Done Got Tired of Tryin' and the raw 2016 set It Is What It Is. In 2019 Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach produced Cypress Grove, bringing Holmes to a broader listenership via Easy Eye Sound.

Holmes entered the world on July 28, 1947, in Yazoo County, Mississippi, the same year his parents established the Blue Front Cafe in Bentonia. When Henry Stuckey relocated next door in 1957, he instructed the boy in his earliest chord voicings. Holmes continued on borrowed instruments through adolescence and acquired his first guitar only in the early 1970s. Visiting musicians including Adam Slater, Cornelius Bright, and Jack Owens imparted the distinctive tunings, phrasing, and songbook of Bentonia blues, while Hill Country stylist Tommy West contributed additional techniques that Holmes incorporated into his developing sound.

Mary Holmes, Jimmy's mother, launched the Bentonia Blues Festival, which he began performing at during the 1980s. Although ethnomusicologists Alan Lomax and David Evans had captured him on tape, Holmes's professional trajectory truly opened on the festival circuit; through the 1980s and 1990s he traveled beyond Mississippi to the Chicago Blues Festival, Tennessee's Muddy Roots Music Festival, and Oregon's Waterfront Blues Festival. Peter Lee of Fat Possum Records documented sessions near Pluto in 2003 intended for his Shade Tree imprint, yet the label folded before release. Producer Jeff Konkel later recorded Holmes at the Blue Front itself, issuing the debut Back to Bentonia on Broke & Hungry in 2006. The collection of Bentonia standards and originals earned Living Blues awards for both artist and producer, establishing Holmes on record. By decade's end he had completed the follow-up Done Got Tired of Tryin' in 2007 and seen the 2003 Shade Tree material appear in 2008 as Gonna Get Old Someday on Fat Possum; that same year he featured in Konkel's documentary M is For Mississippi.

Holmes sustained his recording activity with 2010's Ain't It Lonesome and 2013's All Night Long, which alternated between acoustic sparseness and electric grit, while continuing to oversee the Blue Front, now recognized as America's longest-operating juke joint. The year 2016 brought both the live album Live at Briggs Farm and the electric It Is What It Is on his own Blue Front Records label. After Dan Auerbach reached out, Holmes joined the Easy Eye roster and cut Cypress Grove in 2019.