The Blue Front Café opened in 1948 under the ownership of Carey and Mary Holmes, an African American couple from Bentonia. In its heyday it was famed for buffalo fish, blues, and moonshine whiskey. Their son Jimmy Holmes took over in 1970 and continued operating it as an informal, down-home blues venue that gained international fame among blues enthusiasts. In its early years it was a local gathering spot for workers from the Yazoo County cotton fields, and Carey and Mary Holmes raised ten children and three nephews and sent most of them to college on income from the café and their cotton crops. The café offered hot meals, groceries, drinks, recreation, entertainment, and even haircuts. During segregation it operated under tangled local rules: it was subject to a 10 p.m. town curfew, though at the height of cotton gathering and ginning season it might stay open 24 hours a day to serve workers around the clock; it could not serve Coca-Cola, and black customers in Bentonia could not purchase it or other items reserved for whites, though white customers regularly bought bootleg corn liquor at the back door. After integration it boasted its own Coca-Cola sign. During the 1980s and 1990s it began attracting tourists seeking authentic blues in a rustic setting. Music there was often impromptu and unannounced, with many itinerant harmonica players and guitarists passing through, and performers at times included Skip James, Jack Owens, Henry Stuckey, Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 (Rice Miller), James “Son” Thomas, Bud Spires, Son Johnson, Bobby Batton, Alonzo (Lonzy) Wilkerson, Cleo Pullman, Cornelius Bright, Jacob Stuckey, Dodd Stuckey, Tommy Lee West, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, his brother John, their uncle Percy Smith, cousin Otha Holmes, and on special occasions bands from Jackson led by Eddie Rasberry or Roosevelt Roberts. Musicians also performed at Carey Holmes’s outdoor gatherings on the family farm, which later evolved into the Bentonia Blues Festival sponsored by Jimmy Holmes. In 2000, Mary Alice Holmes Towner, Jimmy’s sister, organized a blues and gospel festival in Marks, Mississippi, and Jimmy Holmes’s first two CDs, released in 2006 and 2007, were recorded there, perpetuating music he learned in Bentonia from Jack Owens and others.