Blue Front Cafe on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
The Blue Front Café is a historic old
The Blue Front Café is a historic old juke joint
Juke joint (also jukejoint, jook house, jook, or juke) is the vernacular term for an informal establishment featuring music, dancing, gambling, and drinking, primarily operated by African Americans in the southeastern United States. A juke joint ...
made of cinder block in Bentonia, Mississippi
Mississippi () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas. Miss ...
on Highway 49, approximately 30 miles northwest of Jackson
Jackson may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Jackson (name), including a list of people and fictional characters with the surname or given name
Places
Australia
* Jackson, Queensland, a town in the Maranoa Region
* Jackson North, Qu ...
, which played an important role in the development of the blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...
in Mississippi. The café has been given a marker and officially placed on the Mississippi Blues Trail
The Mississippi Blues Trail was created by the Mississippi Blues Commission in 2006 to place interpretive markers at the most notable historical sites related to the birth, growth, and influence of the blues throughout (and in some cases beyond) t ...
. It is owned by blues musician Jimmy "Duck" Holmes
Jimmy "Duck" Holmes (born July 28, 1947) is an American blues musician and proprietor of the Blue Front Cafe on the Mississippi Blues Trail, the oldest surviving juke joint in Mississippi. Holmes is known as the last of the Bentonia bluesmen, ...
.
Located in the southern portion of the Mississippi Delta
The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi (and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana) that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo ...
in Yazoo County on Highway 49, the field hands from the surrounding cotton plantations gathered at the Blue Front Café for relaxation and entertainment. This is the birthplace of a blues style known as the "Bentonia
blues."
The venue is profiled in the 2015 documentary film '' I Am the Blues''.
The venue is featured prominently in The Black Keys
The Black Keys are an American rock duo formed in Akron, Ohio, in 2001. The group consists of Dan Auerbach (guitar, vocals) and Patrick Carney (drums). The duo began as an independent act, recording music in basements and self-producing their ...
music video for their cover of "Crawling King Snake
"Crawling King Snake" (alternatively "Crawlin' King Snake" or "Crawling/Crawlin' Kingsnake") is a blues song that has been recorded by numerous blues and other artists. It is believed to have originated as a Delta blues in the 1920s
and be rela ...
".
References