Holly Springs, Mississippi is a town in the center of the region of Mississippi known as the Hill Country, a place known for both Hill Country blues and the unique variant of it which the Kimbrough family calls Cotton Patch Soul Blues, after a community called Cotton Patch which existed near the intersection of Highway 72 and Highway 7 in Benton County during the 1960’s. This crossroads, between Michigan City and Lamar, was the scene of at least one or more juke joints, where rockabilly legend Charlie Feathers and blues legend Junior Kimbrough played together at one time. The extent of their collaboration must be left to conjecture, but it is undoubtedly true that Feathers recommended the man he called “Junior Kimball” to Tom Phillips, the owner of Select-O-Hits and Philwood Records in Memphis, and the small label recorded a 45 single of Kimbrough. Feathers also told an interviewer that Junior Kimbrough was “the beginning and end of all music,” a quote that now graces Junior’s headstone. Of such a legacy is greatness built, and that legacy is now celebrated annually at the Kimbrough Cotton Patch Soul Blues Festival held at The Hut in Holly Springs.
The Friday night opening of the festival is a time for the students in the daytime workshops to show off what they learned, playing with the mentors who were teaching them during the day. This year, the mentors included drummer J. J. Wilburn, Robert Kimbrough and Duwayne Burnside, but Garry Burnside and David Kimbrough also performed.
The venue was a perfect one for the occasion, as The Hut, a former American Legion building on Valley Avenue in Holly Springs, has the ambiance of an old juke joint, made all the more by the smell of barbecue being smoked outside, and the crowds of people gathered around cars in the gathering dusk. Inside, the small room was packed from one end to the other, with barely enough room for people to dance. Yet they found a way.