“I have heard their groans and sighs, and seen their tears, and I would give every drop of blood in my veins to free them.”
Harriet Tubman
As the credits rolled at the end of Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet, I found my eyes welling up, moved by the depiction of this powerful woman, whose determination and heroic action had helped expose slavery for the pernicious evil that it is and rescue hundreds of black women, men and children from the slave-owning South.
Cynthia Erivo’s portrayal of Tubman is masterful, giving you a ready sense of the doughty, fearless character of the woman who not only escaped herself from the Maryland farm where she was enslaved, but then returned again and again, as a conductor on the Underground Railway, to free others. “Slavery,” Tubman said, “is the next thing to hell,” but vowed that “I have heard their groans and sighs, and seen their tears, and I would give every drop of blood in my veins to free them.”
In a recent interview Lemmons made no apology for highlighting Harriet Tubman’s faith and her sense of God’s guidance in the movie. She spoke of “consulting with God,” during her perilous expeditions south and trusted that God would keep her safe. Fellow abolitionist Thomas Garrett said of her, “I never met any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God.”
Black theologian James Cone noted that black slaves were not passive – they resisted the bondage they suffered in a whole range of ways. One of these was the sort of religion they developed. The Christianity embraced by many blacks in slavery was not just that of their masters. The idea of Christianity that black slaves embraced was one where freedom and liberation was vigorously affirmed and one where black humanity was affirmed, despite everything that slavery and white people said.
So black people shouted and prayed, preached and sang about a God who was not confined to the powerful and the free. A God who was for them and loved them and who was their source of strength and dignity in the midst of the trials and hardships of life. A God to whom they looked for deliverance, not just when this life was over, but right now, from the torment of slavery.
The movie also features Tubman using Spirituals to communicate with other slaves in her rescue missions. Coded songs contained words giving directions on how to escape also known as signal songs or where to meet known as map songs. She used “Wade in the Water” to tell slaves to get into the water to avoid being seen and make it through. This is an example of a map song, where directions are coded into the lyrics. “Steal away” meant to sneak into the woods for a secret slave meeting and “Swing low, Sweet Chariot” was used by slaves looking over the Ohio river – “I looked over Jordan and what did I see?” where the chariot was the means of transport northward. I’d read about this before, but as I watched the movie, I began to see how it really could work.
The movie rips along at a thrilling pace, with the tension at times almost unbearable. It’s a great story, it makes for great cinema, with a focus on courage and liberation rather than the horror of slavery (not that this this atrocity and blight on American history is glossed over). It really is a travesty that this is the first significant movie to be made about Harriet Tubman. But then, she has rarely been accorded the recognition she is due. During the Civil War, Tubman served as a nurse, laundress, and spy with Union forces along the coast of South Carolina and was one of the few American women to lead an armed assault – yet despite numerous honours, she spent her last years in poverty.
Most of all, Harriet is a tribute to a remarkable woman, a true American hero. When asked by a BBC interviewer what had happened to the Harriet Tubman $20 bill, Lemmons said simply, “Trump happened,” but went on to express confidence that Harriet would be celebrated in this way in due course. Let’s hope Harriet helps keep the pressure on the US Treasury.
Jimmy “Duck” Holmes is the proprietor of the historic Blue Front Café in Bentonia, Mississippi, and exponent of the Bentonia style of blues guitar. The Blue Front was started by Holmes’s parents eighty years ago and is the oldest remaining juke joint in the state. He only started his recording career in 2003 at the age of 56, and the recently released Cypress Grove is his 9th album. In 2016, the United States Postal Service issued the Mississippi Statehood Commemorative Forever Stamp that featured a close-up rendering of Holmes’s hands.
Photo: Rustin Gudim
Down at the Crossroads got talking to Jimmy about his life and the new album, which was produced by Black Keys frontman, Dan Auerbach, and features musical support from Auerbach and members of his band, Marcus King, Eric Deaton and Sam Bacco. The result is a raw explosion of genuine Mississippi juke-joint blues, with 11 traditional Delta blues songs from Holmes’s extensive repertoire. It’s fabulous stuff, a treat for any blues fan.
Holmes says, “I want to play this music as much as I can because I want younger people to see it and get the passion for it and carry it on. It’s important. It’s blues, so it’s the foundation all American music was built on. I thank God for being blessed enough to be able to have the opportunity to create music that stays true to those old guys who taught me, and that people appreciate it. I’ve never cared for being famous or wealthy. But as long as I live, I’m gonna be on a stage somewhere, singing the old-style country blues.”
Down at the Crossroads had the opportunity to chat to Jimmy about the new album and about a life in the blues. I congratulated him on Cypress Grove and asked if he was pleased with the way it’s turned out. Modestly he replied that he doesn’t really get excited too easily these days, but “I’m 100% appreciative that people like it, it’s something that the blues fan likes. And I’ve had a lot of complements about the album since it’s been released.”
I asked about the recording of the album, and the involvement of Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys.
“Yeah, he was instrumental in making it all happen. It started about three years ago he kept wanting to see if I would come to Nashville to his recording studio [Easy Eye Sound Studio], and I didn’t think much of it. Got on me again last year, but at that time, they didn’t go into what they wanted me to do. I thought they wanted me just to come up and socialize, I had no idea they wanted me to record. But they wanted me to come and play, and I said, if they want to hear me play, they gotta come to Bentonia. But anyways, after about two and a half, three years, it worked out and they had a schedule for recording of three days.
“The first session in the studio, that went well. Went back in the studio the next day and we just about wrapped up and they said to do a couple more songs. I said, that’s good. Normally when you’re in the studio recording, they’ll ask you to do this track again, that track again. But when I’m in the studio, I perform just like I’d perform before an audience. And they said that was just what they wanted, just what they was looking for. So we got there.”
The album is on own Dan Auerbach’s own label, Easy Eye Sound. Auerbach has been a long-time supporter of the blues that inspired him as a young musician, and says, “I like to work with people who inspire me, and Jimmy inspires me. Jimmy’s music is rough and tumble, and it can shatter a lot of preconceptions purists have about Delta blues. At the Blue Front, you never know who’s going to show up, or what instrument they’ll be playing. There could be three guitars, bass, drums, mandolin, and fiddle one weekend, and then the next weekend a banjo player or a saxophonist shows up. So the sound always reflects the ages and experiences and styles of the musicians who are there, and that keeps it fresh, modern, and totally unpredictable.”
Holmes said of working with the Auerbach team, “Matter of fact, every track I laid down, they’s in the background. But they never tried to override me. They backed me up, but never tried to override me sound-wise. I give them credit for that.” He clearly enjoyed working with the guys – “Not one single time did they order me around or direct me. They wanted me to be myself. They never acted like they were producing me. They wanted to make sure I felt I was in control.”
I mentioned how much I’d enjoyed the couple of Skip James songs on the album. The first song is an excellent version of the Skip James classic which Holmes simply calls Hard Times. It’s appropriate that this is the song that kicks off the album, Skip James being perhaps the most famous Bentonia bluesman. James’ haunting, hypnotic open-minor chord style of guitar playing was learned from Bentonian Henry Stuckey, who had learned the tuning from black Bahamian soldiers he’d met in France during World War I. When he returned home, Stuckey taught it to his brother Jacob, Skip James and Jack Owens.
Jimmy Holmes told me, “Strangely enough, I was introduced to the guitar…oh, 1957…by the guy who started the Bentonia sound, Henry Stuckey. He actually didn’t teach me, but his guitar was the first guitar I laid hands on. And that laid the seed in me to learn to play the guitar. I didn’t actually learn from him, I learned from a few more guys, Jacob Stuckey, Jack Owen, Cornelius Bright – they all played the same style of guitar.”
For Holmes, learning the Bentonia blues style seemed like some kind of divine intervention. “Jack Owen, it was the 1980s or early 90s, and he was determined that I would learn that particular style. He didn’t read or write, but he would come every afternoon and teach me by sight. He didn’t know an A chord or a C chord or D, and I think I frustrated him, because he would talk to me and tell me to watch what he was doing, to watch his fingers.” But eventually, through Owen’s determination to insure insuring that this old form of blues would not be forgotten, Holmes caught on to what Owen was doing – “caught on like wildfire.”
Holmes only started performing to an audience about 20 years ago. “I would sit in and play at Blue Front with the regular customers before that,” he said, “but the first time I really got paid was 1999.” Not that he ever really has had any ambition to play for money, or indeed, considers himself a professional musician. He had “a day job at the local school district. But I would always play the guitar off and on.” He is, of course, the proprietor and manager of the Blue Front Café, which had been opened in 1948 by his mother and father where they served cold drinks and offered live music. Holmes took over the Blue Front in 1970, where he continues to preserve and promote the blues, seven days a week.
“The Blue Front,” he told me, “has a deep history of blues. And when I get someone to come and play, I gotta first know that they can play some blues, not saying the whole set, not the whole hour, hour and a half gotta be blues, but they got to be able to play some blues. They want to play some R&B, some soul, that’s fine, but they gotta be able to play some blues.”
I said to him that I’d read he’d once said, “If the Blue Front could talk … boy, could it tell some stories.” He agreed and said, “I could sum it up by saying, the Blue Front Café was a place people came to socialize, people came to hang out. It’s like a big living room in the house with a big back door, like the back yard of your house, and conversation might be about anything.”
I asked Jimmy about the blues, and he referred to the Bentonia guys he grew up listening to.
“They played tight, music that would get into your heart, into your soul. They didn’t play music to make you dance, it was music that told you a true story, something that took your soul. The songs were about something they had experienced, or they knew someone had experienced it.”
But, I suggested, when you listen to the album, there’s a good vibe about it, it’s not down-hearted blues. So, can the blues be upbeat as well?
“That’s a misconception a lot of people have about the blues,” he said. “They think it’s all about hard times and sadness. Sometimes it’s just the opposite. People think it’s about hard times in life – naw, naw. People think of blues as hard times and sadness, they don’t look at the soul behind it.” Sometimes, he agreed, when you start singing the blues, you start feeling better.
This blues music has been around for a long time, so what, I wondered, is the enduring appeal of the blues? Why does it appeal to a new generation?
“Well, he told me, “it’s the foundation of it all. Each generation takes it to another level. They take it and build on it.” The blues won’t stay static with each new generation, and today’s younger generation won’t play “the type we talking about. They might take a couple of pointers from what we do, but they won’t keep it the same.”
But he was insistent that it takes more than musical skill and ability to play the blues. He knows some of today’s artists who “are real good guitarists, and they play some old school blues, but you can’t do it authentic, if it’s not from the heart. If you’re not playing for what you feel, it’s just not there. Even if you’re playing it effectively, it’s not true. Blues, the type I play, you gotta feel it. Deep down in your heart, you gotta feel it.
“The guys I learned from, they didn’t play guitar and sing because it was something you wanted to hear, they played because that was what they felt.”
I reminded him that Willie Dixon once said, the blues is the truth and asked if he agreed with that? “Yeah I talk about that sometimes. The blues guys I knew, they wrote the lyrics though most of them couldn’t read or write. The lyrics were something they had experienced, or they knew someone had experienced and put music to it. Even though we were perfectly entertained by those guys, that wasn’t their purpose.” Their purpose was to “tell their story. If you were entertained that was fine, but that weren’t their purpose.”
Having talked to a couple of other septuagenarian blues artists [Chris Smither; Rory Block] recently, I thought I’d ask Jimmy, finally, about the process of getting older. “I’m 100% appreciative. I got a song – can’t remember what CD it’s on – and it’s got a line, ‘if you keep on living, you’re gonna get old some day.’ You get up in the morning and look in the mirror and you know I’ll be bald or grey! You gonna be old some day. Bottom line – the day you was born, you gonna get old. The day you come in here, you on your way out!”
So, he agreed, the way to handle it was to keep on being positive. Good advice.
Thanks, Jimmy Holmes, for a fascinating insight to the Bentonia blues.
Acoustic guitar blues goes back a long way to the early Delta pioneers like Charley Patton, Son House, Willie Brown – and, of course, Robert Johnson, who followed them around and eventually outstripped his mentors. Blues musicians like Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller, Willie Mctell and Willie Johnson were all skilled exponents of the art before, eventually, the blues would go electric. People like Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy kept the acoustic tradition which was revitalized in the folk revival of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s with the rediscovery of artists like Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Elizabeth Cotton and Rev. Gary Davis.
The legacy was taken on by those who learned from these artists, like Rory Block, John Sebastian, Jorma Kaukonen and others, and acoustic guitar blues has continued to flourish in the capable hands of artists like Taj Mahal, Eric Bibb, Keb’ Mo’, Hans Theessink, Chris Smither, Mary Flower, Guy Davis and many others. And, of course, Rory Block is still going strong. We have to mention, too, Eric Clapton, whose massive selling 1992 Unplugged album put acoustic blues back on show and paved the way for an increase in popularity of the genre ever since.
We’ve chosen a selection of 20 of the best acoustic guitar blues albums from the last 10 years. Check them out and enjoy!
Billy Boy Arnold: Sings Big Bill Broonzy
Veteran blues harp player Arnold, turns in a very fine acoustic guitar driven tribute album to the great Bill Broonzy.
Lurrie Bell: The Devil Ain’t Got No Music
Sparse, stirring 2012 album of gospel blues from Chicagoan Bell, with help from Joe Louis Walker and Billy Branch.
Eric Bibb: Blues, Ballads and Work Songs
We could easily have plumped for any one of Bibb’s recent albums – Blues People (2014), Lead Belly’s Gold (2015) and Booker’s Guitar (2011) all come to mind – but have gone for this 2011 album of traditional blues songs all featuring Bibb’s expert picking and dulcet singing tones. Check out our recent interview with Eric here.
Rory Block A Woman’s Soul
Again, we could easily have chosen one of Block’s fine tribute albums of the last ten years – to Mississippi John Hurt or Rev. Gary Davis, amongst others – but have plumped for her 2018 album of Bessie Smith songs for the clever way in which she has translated the big band arrangements into guitar accompaniment and her fine vocal performance. Check out our interview with Rory here.
Michael Jerome Brown: Can’t Keep a Good Man Down
Canadian Brown is an incredible musician and guitarist, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the blues. This 2015 album of forgotten largely pre-war blues songs is quite wondrous.
Paul Cowley: Just What I Know
I guess most people reading this will not be aware of Paul Cowley, an English musician living in France. This 2018 album of 7 classic blues songs mixed with 5 originals ought to out him on the map. Very fine album. Check out our review of the album here.
Guy Davis & Fabrizio Poggi: Sonnie and Brownie’s Last Train
This 2017 album ought to have earned the artists a Grammy. Two top modern-day artists at the top of their game channelling two of history’s greatest acoustic bluesmen. See our album review here.
Luther Dickinson: Blues and Ballads
Brilliant album of timeless-sounding, original songs from the North Mississippi Allstars front man and top-notch album producer, Luther Dickinson. Lovely gospel vibe throughout and a welcome contribution from Mavis Staples. You’ll find our interview with Luther here.
Mary Flower: Misery Loves Company
Fingerstyle guitarist and music educator, Flower is a master of intricate syncopated Piedmont style finger picking. This 2011 album produced by Colin Linden with half of the 12 songs originals features Flower’s outstanding guitar work.
Mark Harrison The Panoramic View
A hugely enjoyable treat of modern acoustic blues from 2018, full of wondrous finger-picking and slide playing, and giving full vent to Harrison’s compelling story-telling and wry humour. You can find our review here.
Bottleneck John: All Around Man
Again, you may not know of Johan Eliasson aka Bottleneck John, but this 2013 album is an absolute treat. Eliasson has an amazing collection of vintage guitars and resonators and can play them to great effect. Our review can be found here.
Ernie Hawkins: Whinin’ Boy
Hawkins is a masterful guitarist in the blues and ragtime vein pioneered by the legendary Rev Gary Davis. This is a fine album of early jazz and blues songs, with Hawkin’s guitar work augmented by a little clarinet, trombone and trumpet.
Harrison Kennedy with Colin Linden: This is From Here
Canadian singer-songwriter and bluesman, Kennedy’s 2015 album of soulful and authentic blues won a Juno award.
Taj Mahal & Keb Mo: TajMo
Fabulous collaboration album from blues masters Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’ in 2017. This is an adventurous, joyous take on traditional blues from two musicians oozing class and mutual respect. It won a Grammy in 2018. Check out our review of the two in concert here.
Doug MacLeod: There’s a Time
An album of original songs which sound like well-worn acoustic blues classics. Bass and drums accompany MacLeod’s ever tasteful guitar work and excellent vocals. MacLeod is known as the “storytelling bluesman,” and these songs draw you in to their engaging narrative. Superb.
Chris Smither – Still on the Levee
A two-CD retrospective featuring Smither’s own new recordings of a selection of songs from his vast back catalogue to celebrate his 50th year of making music. Witty, intelligent songs, driven by Smither’s metronomic guitar picking. Catch our interview with Chris here.
Hans Theessink & Terry Evans: Delta Time
Hugely enjoyable 2012 acoustic blues album from two of the finest blues singers you’ll hear (sadly Terry Evans passed away in 2018). Great chemistry from the combination of these two contrasting voices with a wonderful gospel sound and lovely harmonies throughout. Also check out their 2008 Visions. You can find our interview with Hans here.
Brooks Williams: Blues
The album is a gem, featuring just Brooks’ voice and guitar – acoustic, resonator and cigar box, and was recorded live in the studio. The result is a very fine album of traditional and classic blues. Worth checking out, too is Brooks’ Baby O! from 2010. Take a look at our interview with Brooks here.
Jontavious Willis: Spectacular Class
Spectacular Class is an album of timeless acoustic blues, released in 2019 by a young man hailed by Taj Mahal as a “great new voice of the 21st century in the acoustic blues.” It’s an album that sounds at once traditional but at the same time entirely fresh, with an outstanding set of songs driven by his top-notch guitar picking and his hugely entertaining vocals. You can find our interview with Jontavious here.
Various Artists: Things About Comin’ My Way – A Tribute to the music of the Mississippi Sheiks
Terrific tribute album from a variety of artists, including Bill Frisell, John Hammond and Bruce Cockburn.
Black theologian James Cone noted that black slaves were not passive – they resisted the bondage they suffered in a whole range of ways. One of these was the sort of religion they developed. The Christianity embraced by many blacks in slavery was not just that of their masters. The idea of Christianity that black slaves embraced was one where freedom and liberation was vigorously affirmed and one where black humanity was affirmed, despite everything that slavery and white people said.
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