Jimmy “Duck” Holmes: “Cypress Grove” (2019) CD Review

Do you have the blues these days? You are not alone. The entire country is gripped in some twisted nightmare, with the humorless scoundrels having taken hold of the reins and driven the nation into darkness. Perhaps for this reason the blues are speaking more strongly to us. Of course, whatever the circumstances, blues as good as that put out by Jimmy “Duck” Holmes would speak strongly to us. At the age of 72, this Mississippi blues man is still cooking. His new album, Cypress Grove, features a mix of original material and classic blues covers, with an excellent raw power. The album was produced by Dan Auerbach, the vocalist and guitarist for The Black Keys, and he also plays guitar on most of the tracks. The other musicians backing Jimmy “Duck” Holmes on this release include Eric Deaton on bass, and Sam Bacco on drums, along with a couple of special guests on certain tracks.

Jimmy “Duck” Holmes starts the album with a solo piece, “Hard Times,” a different take on “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” a tune written by Skip James It has a deliciously raw sound that is undeniably powerful. This is pure blues, just voice and guitar, a wonderful way to get things going, to pull us in and put us in the right frame of my mind. The rhythm section then comes in on “Cypress Grove,” the album’s title track, which was also written by Skip James. Eric Deaton and Sam Bacco set the groove for Jimmy, who then comes in to tell us, “I’d rather be dead/Dead in some old cypress grove/I’d rather be dead/Dead in some old cypress grove/Than to have a woman I can’t control.”

The first track to include Dan Auerbach is “Catfish Blues,” and on it he delivers some excellent stuff on electric guitar, including a cool lead section in the second half of the song that has just the right amount of fuzz. “I don’t want to be no crawfish/And I don’t want to be no, no bullfrog/If I can’t be a catfish/I don’t want to be no fish at all.” That’s followed by a good rendition of “Goin’ Away Baby” that has a cool, groovy vibe and something of a late 1960s blues feel. He sounds earnest, serious, as he sings “If you don’t want me, please don’t dog me around/If you don’t want me, woman, please don’t dog me around.” This track features more exciting work on electric guitar toward the end. We are then treated to a cover of Muddy Waters’ “Rock Me,” which has a steady rhythm that moves ahead, unimpeded. This track features three guitarists – Jimmy Holmes, Dan Auerbach and Marcus King – so you can be sure there is some delicious stuff on guitar.

Jimmy “Duck” Holmes delivers an interesting rendition of Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster.” It starts off loose, like the band is just warming up, getting started. I learned about a lot of great music through my passion for the Grateful Dead, and this is one of those songs. They played it fairly often. I love the use of saxophone on this rendition, and the way it leads the band into a cool jam at the end. That’s Leon Michels on sax. That’s followed by “Devil Got My Woman,” which has more of a raw, back porch vibe. This one is performed by the trio of Holmes, Deaton and Bacco. And Jimmy Holmes gives a seriously good vocal performance here. “I said come back baby, please come back baby/Try me one more time/I know it wasn’t nothing but the devil/Made you change your mind.” He also delivers some absolutely wonderful work on guitar. This song interestingly has the lines about trying to get some rest that I mostly associate with “I Know You Rider”: “Lay down last night/Yes, I lay down last night, lay down last night/Trying to get my rest/But you know my mind, my mind got to rambling/Like the wild geese from the west.”  And actually those are the last lines of this version.

“All Night Long” has something of an improvised feel, taking a moment to come together at the beginning. This is the first of the album’s original numbers, written by Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, and is a song he is revisiting, having used it as the title track to an earlier release as well as on the album Ain’t It Lonesome. Marcus King joins him on guitar on this track. “All Night Long” is followed by another of Jimmy’s original compositions, “Gonna Get Old Someday.” It’s interesting that he chose to put all the original numbers at the end rather than placing them throughout the album. “If you keep on living/Man, you’re going to get old/You’re going to get old someday.” And yeah, there is some humor to a man in his seventies singing about getting old someday, but this song is playful through and through. “Yes, I said I was going to stop drinking/And I was going to stop running around.” This is a song that Holmes had recorded earlier, using it as the title track to his 2008 LP. Is he speaking from experience when he sings “You’re gonna wake up one morning, one morning/And you can’t do the things you used to do”? I don’t know. Based on this music, he seems capable of whatever he wants to do.

“Train Train” is a song that has some things in common with “Mystery Train.” Jimmy Holmes had recorded this one earlier as well, including it on All Night Long. The album then concludes with “Two Women,” another original tune, this one about a man who has both a large woman and a tiny woman. “Yeah, they tell me, they tell me my woman been hanging around, hanging around, hanging around the county jail/Tell me she makes a whole lot of money going from cell to cell to cell.” Which woman is he referring to here, I wonder. Perhaps it’s the tiny woman, for Jimmy then sings that the big woman tells him, “What I’m gonna do for you, Jimmy Duck, I swear I wouldn’t do for nobody else.”

CD Track List

1. Hard Times
2. Cypress Grove
3. Catfish Blues
4. Goin’ Away Baby
5. Rock Me
6. Little Red Rooster
7. Devil Got My Woman
8. All Night Long
9. Gonna Get Old Someday
10. Train Train
11. Two Women 

Cypress Grove was released on October 18, 2019 through Easy Eye Sound.