I’m traveling in Mississippi as a guest of Visit the Delta. Nearly all my travel expenses are paid for.
It feels a little bit like Jimmy “Duck” Holmes is just waiting for you to show up. There were a couple of local kids hanging around, drinking soda at the picnic tables on the side of the building, but Jimmy “Duck” Holmes — everyone I met was saying all three names — was on the front porch mid-morning, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, and there was another plastic chair so I sat there with him for a while. “Go inside and take some pictures,” he said, “all you want,” and he followed me in and put a quarter in the jukebox and the place filled with the sound of soul on vinyl. “They’re all 45s,” he said, “when’s the last time you saw a working jukebox like this. A working jukebox in a jook joint, that’s something. I hope nothing ever happens to it, it’ll take me forever to get parts.
Jimmy “Duck” Holmes asked where I was from and told me he had people come by from all over the world. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to some graffiti on the front door. “Uruguay! All the way from South America to come here!” He told me he’d be up in Port Townsend to “… play guitar and teach.”
“Oh, man, I gotta come see you.”
“You do that,” he said. “I won’t remember your name, I’m bad with names, but I’m good with faces. The lady with the red car, traveling alone, I’ll remember.” I believed him.
He then gave me very explicit instructions on how to get where I was going. “Don’t take the highway,” he said, “you want the two lane road.” And he made that movement with his big hands, that swoop everyone does when describing a looping two lane highway. “You’re gonna cross the tracks and go to the water tower and turn there. Pass the two stops signs, and then, you can put where you’re going in the GPS. You do it before then, it’s going to send you back to the highway, and you want the two lane road, you hear?”
I heard. And when an old blues man tells you how to get where you’re going in his part of the world, well, that is exactly what you do.
