Jimmy “Duck” Holmes — Bentonia Blues / Right Now

In Bentonia, Mississippi, geography is destiny for guitar men. Heaped on top of that fate is abundant audible proof that life is even far less of a picnic in that small Delta town (Pop. 274, in 2023). But such a perfect storm makes for a profoundly surreal experience.

Bentonia, in fact, is home to the bluest, badluckest blues around. They don’t come any bluer.

Just ask or, better yet, listen to the incumbent King of Pain: 78-year-old Jimmy “Duck” Holmes. He inherited the dubious crown from Jack Owens (1904-1997), who, in turn, was bequeathed the throne from Nehemiah “Skip” James (1902-1969), who, in succession, took over from Henry “Son” Stuckey (1896ish-1966).

That’s how things have long worked in these parts of Yazoo County, whereby each hometown fretsman sequentially assumes possession of the telltale local sound, as if through a secret handshake transferred from guitar to guitar. Much like the hill-country blues living up in the kudzu kingdom of north Mississippi, Bentonia has its own telltale regional brand that comes out of its own stylistic school, which traditionally utilizes its own special, gloomy guitar tuning—the minor-key crossnote. It’s what bloodshot eyes sound like. Yet each man then tweaks his own signature fingerprint. Blindfolded, you can pick out the ring of Jimmy from Jack from Skip. “Son,” regrettably, never was recorded.

And, yes, Skip is the soured darling of the 1960s Blues Rediscovery circuit, whose ghostly 1931 sides for Paramount Records featured “I’m So Glad” (that breathed fire when deployed by Cream on their 1969 farewell memento, Goodbye) and “Devil Got My Woman” (which scored a prime spotlight in the cult-classic film Ghost World). Jack, for his part, “starred” (along with the harmonica-wheezing Bud Spires) in a 1995 Levi’s 501 Blues commercial. And Jimmy—ringmaster for all-things-blue-Bentonia, including the annual Bentonia Blues Festival—garnered a 2021 Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Blues Album in Cypress Grove.

By sinking all the lower here, the immersive Bentonia Blues / Right Now rises to the peak point atop Holmes’ nine or so albums. Songs unfold their heavy-lidded mood in almighty droning grooves that slither off through the shadows, dredging misery at boxcar-slow paces. The effect becomes habit forming—regardless of the subject matter, delivered stone-faced, checking such boxes as relentless nightmares, lonesome isolation, the unforgiving tick of time, unfaithfulness, the threat of murder, and whatever else churns the stomach and wrings hands. So, the anxiety-riddled “Hurry, Hurry” is not out to break any land-speed records or get voted as the rah-rah life of the party. Remember, these are Bentonia blues: Meet them once and they’ll forever haunt you.

This is music made for your writhing pleasure.

And specially made inside the historic epicenter of Bentonia blues: the Blue Front Cafe. The

compact, cinderblock cavern, plunked down at 107 W. Railroad Ave for the past 77 years or so, houses a long-standing history of functioning as a juke. Holmes is also its proprietor. And every one of them—the full line of royalty, from Jimmy all the way back to Henry—played inside at one point in time.

That is the very spot where Bentonia Blues / Right Now was recorded. Straight to analog tape went the events, live off the Blue Front’s concrete floor, spontaneous, real and unmanufactured. Because next to the jukebox that is tucked into the back corner sat a reel-to-reel deck quietly eavesdropping on the one-day session in April 2024. No slick doctoring or scripting. No gussying up. Just raw nerves twitching away on guitars in front of hungry microphones. After all, to quote the great John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins: Blues is a feeling.

Drawing you in from the start is “Devil in the Dark.” It’s Jimmy’s own subspecies of the home team’s mascot. You recall, Skip had “Devil Got My Woman”; Jack spun off “It Must Have Been the Devil”; Stuckey supposedly launched the brand on “Devil’s Dream,” the fiendish prototype only known by way of word-of-mouth because, without any recordings, you had to have sat across from him to hear it.

Holmes’ devilish creation is also the first we hear that the singing six-string guitarist isn’t alone. The album turns out to be a sparse, moody collaboration with two out-of-town guests that respectfully adhere to Jimmy’s rules of play. Boston’s Ryan Lee Crosby—a guitarist and singer in his own right (his At the Blue Front drops in mid-August)—spider-walks along a 12-string guitar. The unique percussive clip-clop-and-thump comes from Grant Smith’s hand-thwacked calabash, a primordial West African drum of sorts. The minimal, mesmeric combination shores up parallels with distant albums like Niafunké from Ali Farka Touré, Mali’s founding father of so-called desert blues.

The music, thankfully still caught in time and defiantly refusing to crossbreed with other musical styles, does receive a favorable upgrade here: Holmes plugs in, the first of the Bentonia kings to do so. Electrification suits the atmosphere as well as both guitars. The other act of daring brilliance was to let the songs off their leash, to sometimes stray even beyond the 10-minute mark. Five tracks consume the 40 minutes, affording a proper amount of time and space to fully set the trance. As such, the rhythm sloshes back and forth, yoked to perfectly sludgy tempos, as those serpentine guitar lines entangle each other until one of them gurgles up whenever the urge arises to solo, before ducking back down into the unrelenting murky undertow. Jamming until they get their fill. “All Night Long,” a drinking song, breaks from that slow, hypnotic slosh of, say, “Knick Knacks All Day” or the downward spiraling “Hairdresser,” by putting a bit of a skip in its step.

Yet true to Henry, then Skip, then Jack, Jimmy keeps the streak going by making zero attempt to feign being upbeat. Because the present King of Pain has Bentonia Blues standards to uphold.

Label: Crossnote Records

Release date: 6/17/25

Artist website: Jimmy "Duck" Holmes: Facebook

Album website: Bandcamp