Bentonia sits off Highway 49 about eleven miles south of Yazoo City, and it gave the blues a style of its own. The Bentonia school is known for a plaintive falsetto and a cross-note minor guitar tuning. Skip James, born in 1902 on the Whitehead Plantation near town, is its best-known name. His "22-20 Blues," cut in Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1931, was the model for Robert Johnson's "32-20 Blues." Jack Owens kept the sound alive in Bentonia into the 1990s.
The Blue Front Cafe opened in 1948 under Carey and Mary Holmes, an African American couple who replaced a wooden market on the site. It was known for buffalo fish, blues and moonshine, and it served cotton workers hot meals, groceries and haircuts. The Holmeses raised ten children and three nephews and sent most of them to college on the proceeds. Segregation set the rules: a 10 p.m. town curfew, and no Coca-Cola for Black customers, who could buy only Nehi and Double Cola, while white customers bought bootleg whiskey at the back door. After integration the cafe put up a Coca-Cola sign of its own.
Their son Jimmy "Duck" Holmes took over in 1970 and learned the Bentonia style from Owens, who told him to watch his hands. Owens won a National Heritage Fellowship in 1993. Holmes recorded his first two albums at the cafe in 2006 and 2007. It is a family-run place, not a scheduled venue, so confirm opening days before you drive out.
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