Alva Review-Courier -

BENTONIA, Miss. (AP) — With callused hands, Jimmy "Duck" Holmes plucks an old acoustic guitar at the juke joint his parents started more than 70 years ago. He checks the cafe's inventory: jars of pickled eggs, beef jerky, pork hocks. He tends to the wood-burning stove, made from an oil-field pipe. And every morning, he eventually settles in on a stool behind the counter, waiting — hoping — that someone who wants to hear him play will drop in.

Holmes, 73, is the last Bentonia bluesman, the carrier of a dying musical and oral storytelling tradition born in this Mississippi town of less than 500...