Evento

CEDRIC BURNSIDE PROJECT & JIMMY "DUCK" HOLMES

CEDRIC BURNSIDE is the ultimate "ambassador" of North Mississippi Hill Country blues, a form NY Times critic Robert Palmer called a churning, one-chord exercise in mass hypnosis. Cedric first came to fame as a teeneger in his grandfather's (the late great blues legend R.L. Burnside) band. As one-third of the Burnside sound, he developed a reputation for banging the drums very very hardcombining brute power with an innate sense of Hill Country rhythm. After his grandfather's death, Cedric added singing and guitar playing to his arsenal, most notably as half of Two Man Wrecking Crew, for which he won "drummer of the year" at the 2009 Blues Music Awards. Now he's heading his own band, based as always in the deep-blues tradition. We're happy to welcome back an old friend.

JIMMY "DUCK" HOLMES runs the Blue Front juke joint in Bentonia, one of the oldest in Mississippi. A practitioner of the Bentonia style, whose most famous proponent was Skip James, the music is characterized by E-Minor and open D-Minor tunings, dark lyrical themes often sung in falsetto, and an eerie overall quality. Born to sharecroppers in 1947, Duck practically grew up at the Blue Front, his parents' juke, which served meals, sold groceries, housed a barbershop, and hawked bootleg corn liquor. With the money they earned from the café and harvesting cotton, the Holmes sent most of their children to college. Duck, who founded the Bentonia Blues Festival and works as an educator, has always been a reluctant performer. Various blues researchers including Alan Lomax recorded him in the '70s. His 2006 debut disc, Back to Bentonia, garnered several Living Blues Awards and put him in front of huge audiences at the Chicago Blues Festival, among others. 2007's sophomore effort, Done Got Tired of Tryin', was nominated for a Blues Music Award for Acoustic Album of the Year, and National Public Radio listed it as one of the year's top-10 blues albums.