Cypress Grove

72-year-old bluesman Jimmy “Duck” Holmes’ new album, the Dan Auerbach produced Cypress Grove, captures the raw, explosive sound of real Mississippi Juke-Joint Blues today. Cypress Grove is an aural postcard of a typical Saturday night at Holmes’ Blue Front Café, America’s longest operating juke joint. The album is anchored by tradition — which is natural, since Holmes is the last of the original torchbearers of the rural style known as Bentonia blues—but it’s also explosive, raw, and unpredictably in the moment.

Jimmy "Duck" Holmes is one of the last practitioners of old-fashioned Mississippi blues, playing a variation that belongs to the Yazoo county town of Bentonia.