THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

By going out into the world to see what real looks like. One of the real being sought is the heart and home of the real blues in the Mississippi Delta. And the state of Mississippi, having failed all these years to improve the lives of the people, largely black, in this area has hit upon a great idea to exploit them, tourism.

The Mississippi Blues Commission, working with national grant money and funding from local communities, has nearly completed the Blues Trail. It consists of 215 signs marking significant locations in blues history, with a website and phone app to guide tourists. Several new blues museums have opened in the last decade, including the $15 million B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, and the number of blues festivals has increased from a handful to more than 50.

When the state legislature authorized the Blues Trail in 2008, economic development was stated as the primary goal. Mississippi is the poorest state in America, and the great hope is that blues tourism will stimulate economic activity, especially in the impoverished and largely African-American communities where the music originated. That hasn’t happened yet in Bentonia. The town is so small and broke that it has almost nothing to sell to visitors. There’s no motel and only one restaurant, open on Friday and Saturday nights during crawfish season. Holmes can arrange for food at the Blue Front Café, but only if visitors call a few days in advance. Otherwise, he just serves just beer and soda.

Holmes has increased his income slightly by selling T-shirts and CDs, by renting out the venue to outside musicians, who are thrilled to play in a real Mississippi juke joint, and by performing himself, for tips. He’s the last one left who plays the uniquely haunting, hypnotic style of blues that developed in Bentonia. Its most famous exponent was Skip James, who recorded in the 1930s and again during the blues revival of the 1960s. Holmes mastered the Bentonia style as a young man, but he didn’t record any albums or play any live shows until he was in his 60s. Now he plays summer blues festivals in Europe, Israel and all over the United States.

“People around here have zero interest in the blues,” he says. “They want music they can dance to. The audience for my type of music is all from other places now and mostly white.”...

When tourists started showing up here, I couldn’t figure out what they saw in the place,” says Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, a 67-year-old blues musician and owner of the Blue Front Café. It’s a scruffy little drinking spot and informal music venue — a juke joint. The floor is weathered concrete. The barstools are hammered together from raw lumber and painted blue. Heat comes from a piece of oil-field pipe converted into a wood-burning stove.

“My parents started the Blue Front in 1948, and it ain’t been nothing but a juke joint ever since,” says Holmes, a slow-moving medium-built man with a rich, grainy speaking voice. He is sipping a late morning beer and smoking a long menthol cigarette. “It ain’t nothing fancy, but it’s authentic and original, and that’s what the tourists like, I’ve come to understand. They don’t have anything authentic in their regular lives, so they feel drawn to it.

And soon the last of the real will be varnished and protected, perhaps even restored to its original realness.