The Bentonia School

Bentonia, a town of about three hundred people in Yazoo County, has its own school of blues, recognised by musicologists and named for the town. It is built on an open tuning to a minor rather than a major chord, which Skip James called cross note, and the name is the point: the tuning lets a player cross between major and minor tonalities in a way standard blues tunings make awkward. The result is eerie and unresolved. The scholarship agrees about the subject matter, David Evans describing lyrics that deal in loneliness, death and the supernatural, and the state marker specifying songs that bemoan the work of the devil. The style is credited to Henry Stuckey, a Bentonia guitarist who told an interviewer in 1965 that he had picked the tuning up from Black soldiers in France during the First World War, then declined to be recorded and died the following year. Stuckey is known almost entirely through the men he taught. The best known was Nehemiah Curtis James, called Skip, who cut twenty one sides for Paramount at Grafton, Wisconsin in 1931, five on piano, was paid forty dollars, sold almost none into the Depression, left music for three decades and was found again in a Tunica hospital in 1964. Jack Owens, taught by Stuckey too and a contemporary rather than a successor, farmed, bootlegged, ran a juke house and played into his nineties. The Blue Front Cafe on East Railroad Avenue was opened by Carey and Mary Holmes in 1948, and the state marker calls it one of the longest existing juke joints in Mississippi. Their son Jimmy Duck Holmes has kept it since 1970, made his first record at fifty nine, and was nominated for a Grammy in 2021 for an album Dan Auerbach produced.