![]() Now he plays summer blues festivals in Europe, Israel and all over the United States. Holmes mastered the Bentonia style as a young man, but he didn’t record any albums or play any live shows until he was in his 60s. Its most famous exponent was Skip James, who recorded in the 1930s and again during the blues revival of the 1960s. ![]() He’s the last one left who plays the uniquely haunting, hypnotic style of blues that developed in Bentonia. Holmes has increased his income slightly by selling T-shirts and CDs, by renting out the venue to outside musicians, who are thrilled to play in a real Mississippi juke joint, and by performing himself, for tips. Otherwise, he just serves just beer and soda. Holmes can arrange for food at the Blue Front Café, but only if visitors call a few days in advance. There’s no motel and only one restaurant, open on Friday and Saturday nights during crawfish season. The town is so small and broke that it has almost nothing to sell to visitors. Mississippi is the poorest state in America, and the great hope is that blues tourism will stimulate economic activity, especially in the impoverished and largely African-American communities where the music originated. When the state legislature authorized the Blues Trail in 2008, economic development was stated as the primary goal. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, and the number of blues festivals has increased from a handful to more than 50. Several new blues museums have opened in the last decade, including the $15 million B.B. It consists of 215 signs marking significant locations in blues history, with a website and phone app to guide tourists. The Mississippi Blues Commission, working with national grant money and funding from local communities, has nearly completed the Blues Trail. Most of the early, influential bluesmen were born here, and the state dominates the Blues Hall of Fame, with Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, B.B. But the slogan refers mainly to Mississippi’s deep blues heritage. Long known for poverty and racial injustice, the state has rebranded itself as the “Birthplace of America’s Music.” Elvis Presley was a Mississippian, and so was Jimmie Rodgers, a founding father of country music. The influx of outsiders at the Blue Front Café reflects a widespread effort in Mississippi to promote cultural tourism based on the blues. See, this is where American music comes from. New York, California, Montana - all over America. “We had 200 from Belgium and they like to ran me ragged. “Australia, Great Britain, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Israel, France, Argentina - you name it,” he says. On summer weekends, tour buses have become a regular sight in Bentonia, a tiny, half-derelict farming town just outside the Mississippi Delta. ![]() In the last eight or nine years, he says, a slow trickle of tourists has increased to a steady flow and sometimes an unwelcome deluge. ![]() For a lot of blues fans, that’s what it’s all about.” They don’t have anything authentic in their regular lives, so they feel drawn to it. ![]() “It ain’t nothing fancy, but it’s authentic and original, and that’s what the tourists like, I’ve come to understand. He is sipping a late morning beer and smoking a long menthol cigarette. “My parents started the Blue Front in 1948, and it ain’t been nothing but a juke joint ever since,” says Holmes, a slow-moving medium-built man with a rich, grainy speaking voice. Heat comes from a piece of oil-field pipe converted into a wood-burning stove. The barstools are hammered together from raw lumber and painted blue. It’s a scruffy little drinking spot and informal music venue - a juke joint. When tourists started showing up here, I couldn’t figure out what they saw in the place,” says Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, a 67-year-old blues musician and owner of the Blue Front Café. ![]()
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