A Broke & Hungry Records release is the next best thing to a juke joint
By Stefene Russell
Photograph by Mark Gilliland
On the edge of a cotton field somewhere in rural Mississippi, there’s a low-lying cinder block building with a hand-painted sign. The interior is lit by Christmas lights, which hang over mismatched Formica tables, wobbly chairs and a pool table scarred up with cigarette burns. At the bar you can get peanuts, cigarettes, gum, pickled pigs’ feet and three kinds of beer in the can. And on the stage—well, it’s more like a cleared-out area near a window or an electrical socket—you can hear scratchy, raggedy-ass, spooky country blues.
“The thing about a great juke joint is, that line between where the audience is and where the musician is, it’s pretty blurry,” says Jeff Konkel, proprietor of local independent blues label Broke & Hungry Records. “You’ll see people dancing right on top of the musician, more or less. It’s not unusual to see a musician bring down the top of his guitar on an overzealous dancer when they get too close.”
In fact, Konkel was at a juke joint—Po’ Monkey’s in Merigold, Miss.—when he decided to start Broke & Hungry two years ago.
“There’s real-deal blues to be found in these rough-and-tumble juke joints,” he says. “R.L. Burnside had just passed away shortly before that, as did a couple of other guys that I was hugely inspired by. I thought, ‘Time is a-wasting—I gotta get these guys recorded.’”
Burnside, who was on Fat Possum Records, was one of the reasons Konkel—and lots of other young music fans—fell in love with blues. After hearing the raw, haunting music of the Mississippi Delta they realized it had more in common with punk than with the slick, narcoleptic stuff on mainstream radio. But to keep the lights on, Fat Possum has swerved toward indie rockers, and Konkel (who jokingly calls Broke & Hungry “an expensive hobby,” admitting that with a day job in the PR industry, he’s not in danger of being either) is happy to fill that void.
The label’s first disc, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes’ Back to Bentonia, wowed music critics from Louisiana to Finland after its release last April. The “Bentonia sound” refers to a peculiar blues tradition, originating in Bentonia, Miss., that combines an open D-minor tuning and keening vocals. The style began with Henry Stuckey, a World War I vet who picked up the open tuning style from some Bahamian musicians he met in France during the war. Fans assumed that the style had died out with Jack Owens, a Betonia bluesman rediscovered during the ’60s folk boom—until Konkel recorded Holmes.
“Jimmy’s really the last guy who plays in that tradition,” Konkel says. “What I find interesting is that he sings songs he learned from those guys, but he also writes in that tradition.”
Most of Back to Bentonia was recorded at the Blue Front Café, a juke joint Holmes inherited from his parents, who opened it in 1948. For those acoustic sessions, Konkel brought in harp player Bud Spires, who played with Jack Owens. There were also a few electric sessions at Jimbo Mathus’ Delta Recording Studio, in Clarksdale, with Robert Nighthawk’s son, Sam Carr, on drums.
“It took ’em a while,” Konkel says of Holmes and Carr. “It’s like watching two people who speak different dialects trying to figure out where their shared language is. There’s almost a loping hill-country quality to the tracks that Sam played on, and that seemed to be the language that they shared.”
Though Holmes refuses to fly (Konkel could book a solid month of European gigs for him otherwise), he’s as reliable as rain and unafflicted by substance-abuse issues, a trait Konkel describes as “refreshing”; he plans to release several more of Holmes’ discs.
By contrast, Konkel says he will probably never see Odell Harris again. B&H’s second release, Searching for Odell Harris, was recorded in a club in Ocean Springs, Miss. Prior to recording him, the only thing Konkel knew about Harris was that he was an amazing guitarist—and completely unreliable. Konkel drove down south with the full knowledge that the session might not happen; as it turns out, it was merely harrowing. Harris was waiting at the club, along with a rowdy, drunk crowd that refused to depart at closing time. Attempts to shush them during takes nearly resulted in a barfight, and Konkel’s polite requests to Harris that he sing into the mic or quit talking midtake “were met with bemused smirks.” Then, at 4 a.m., the magic started to happen. The band played until 7:30, stopping only because the tape ran out.
That recording session stands as the most chaotic in B&H’s history, though Konkel has continued to record in juke joints. Meet Me in the Cotton Field, which was released in April, is “a collection of a cappella field hollers, acoustic country blues and searing electric juke-joint workouts” featuring Terry “Big T” Williams and Wesley “Junebug” Jefferson. Most of it was recorded in Red’s Lounge in Clarksdale, which Konkel describes as “one of the Delta’s grungiest and best juke joints.”
“You have people today who say, ‘I’m gonna write a modern song about the Internet blues!’ That stuff just doesn’t interest me,” Konkel says. “Some of these guys couldn’t write a modern blues song if they wanted to. When Jimmy writes a song, even if he’s singing a song about something that happened five months ago, it sounds like it could’ve happened 100 years ago. I’m just trying to get these guys out there before they disappear.”
B&H will release Jimmy “Duck” Holmes’ second disc, Done Got Tired of Tryin’, this month;
Holmes plays live at BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, at 7:30 p.m. June 29.
For more information, go to brokeandhungryrecords.com.
