“This is the last juke standing that’s still in operation.” As a boy he helped out around the restaurant, which still serves sandwiches and hamburgers most Fridays and Saturdays. “You got a lot of used-to-bes-‘that building used to be this, that building used to be that,’” Holmes says. Though aware of his place in history, Holmes is also quick to praise fellow artists: “There’s a thousand blues musicians that’s just as good at what they do.” This article is a selection from the September issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 Today it’s thought to be the oldest surviving blues joint in Mississippi. But the Blue Front, where legends such as Nehemiah “Skip” James and Jack Owens played in the 1950s and ’60s, was the most famous, the Grand Ole Opry of the exotic Bentonia sound.

By night, there were moonshine parties and impromptu performances by local musicians, who played a distinctive style of blues unique to the Blue Front and other juke joints in the hills between the Big Black and Yazoo rivers. Holmes’ parents opened the Blue Front in 1948 to serve hot meals to townspeople who labored at the cotton gin or on the surrounding farms. His gray hair sneaks out from underneath a black cap. He’s dressed in black pants and a gray hooded sweatshirt. Holmes swings his left leg over his right knee, revealing a scuffed, dusty black loafer. The rumble and clanging of boxcars fills the café as I take a seat across from the proprietor, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, who at 73 is the last in a line of bluesmen from Bentonia. The Blue Front Cafe sits at one end of the street, next to the rusted husk of a former cotton gin and across the railroad tracks from a string of long-shuttered storefronts and sagging rooflines. On a pale morning in Bentonia, Mississippi, a village of 400-odd souls, one of the few signs of life are the half-dozen pickup trucks parked or idling outside Planters Supply, the local feed and seed.

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