52 weeks of blues

Mississippi John Hurt is a legendary bluesman who was rediscovered in the blues revival of the 1960s. John’s music was very different from other bluesmen of his time, but remains some of the most popular and influential blues music of all time. His guitar technique and soothing vocal style have made him an immortal of the blues.
He was born as John Smith Hurt on either Mach 8, 1892 or July 3, 1893 in the very small Mississippi Delta community of Teoc in Carroll County. His parents were Mae Jane Smith and Paul Hurt, slaves free by emancipation. John was the 8th of 10 children and when he was a toddler they moved to the nearby small village of Avalon, population under 100.
In Avalon, John attended school until the fourth grade, learning to read and write, then he started working as a farm hand for a neighbour, Felix Healey, sitting on the back of a mule and ploughing fields. When he was 9, a guitar player by the name of William Henry Carson began dating his teacher at school, and would stay overnight in the Hurt household. John was infatuated with Carson’s guitar: “I wasn’t allowed to bother Mr. Carson’s guitar. I would wait until he feel asleep at my house, then I would slip his guitar into my room and try to play”. He secretly taught himself ragtimey songs like ‘Hop Joint’. His mother heard him and mistook his playing for Carson’s. When she realised that he had a natural ear for music, she scraped together the grand total of $1.50 and bought him his own guitar – a black coloured acoustic that he named “Black Annie”.
Avalon was a neighbourly small community of white and coloured folk and was largely free from the racial issues that plagued the southern towns and cities in the years after slavery. John learnt music in this environment, playing for small parties, fish fries and at church. He was entirely self-taught, and unlike most other players from the delta area, he developed an intricate finger picking style and sang in a quiet, conversational style formed by playing to small groups in intimate settings. He was comfortable in life and safe where he was living – he didn’t holler or stomp or cry the blues, nor did he feel the need to get on the road to seek a better life.
His father passed away when John was in his early teems, and John hired himself to Avalon’s farming community as a field hand raising cotton, potatoes and corn. In 1915 he left Avalon for the first time to work on the Illinois Central railroad. He was in a work gang, and they sang work songs as they laboured. He learnt classics like ‘John Henry’ and Casey Jones’ and picked up harmonic ideas. After 5 months he was back in Avalon, helping his mother. In 1916 he married Gertrude Hoskins and had two children over the next 5 years. Around this time a travelling minstrel show asked him to go on tour with them “but I said no because I just never wanted to get away from home”. He and Gertrude separated not long after, and John later married Jessie Lee Cole in 1927, who fathered him another child.
Carrol County had a few other notable musicians, including the white fiddle and guitar duo of Willie Narmour and Shellie Smith who would tour the country playing ragtime and old style country music. Willie Narmour lived in Avalon was good friends with John, and in 1923 (illustrating the lack of racial tensions in Avalon) John began to accompany Narmour when Smith was unavailable, playing square dance music. In 1928, Willie Narmour won a fiddling contest where the first prize was a recording session with Okeh records. Okeh producer T.J. Rockwell came to Avalon to take Narmour to the mobile recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee, and asked about any other local musicians worth hearing.
Narmour took Rockwell to John’s shack, and John played a rendition of ‘Monday Morning Blues’. This impromptu performance impressed Rockwell so much that he invited John to record with Okeh. On February 14, 1928, John travelled to Memphis and recorded 8 tracks, of which just 2 were released – “Frankie” with “Nobody’s Dirty Business” as the B side. Rockwell added “Mississippi” to the front of John’s name as a marketing gimmick. The record wasn’t a huge success, but it did sell enough to ensure a second recording session in December of the same year.
That session was recorded in New York City over the Christmas period, John was 35 or 36 and it was his third trip outside of Avalon. He met the famous Lonnie Johnson and jammed with him a few time, and he also briefly met the legendary Bessie Smith. He recorded on the 21st and the 28th of December, 1928, and the tracks include the definitive version of “Stack-O-Lee Blues”, “Candy Man Blues”, “Spike Driver Blues” (learned from his rail road days, the ode to his home “Avalon Blues” and murder Ballads like “Louis Collins”- He recorded 12 tracks, and 10 were released on five 78s. Unfortunately, the singles were not successful – it has been speculated that John’s softer, conversational style of singing wasn’t as popular as the raw, dirtier blues coming out of other areas of the Mississippi Delta, and Okeh only promoted the discs as race records, limiting the potential audience.
The Great Depression started to be felt soon after, and opportunities were scarce for musicians. After his week in New York, John went back to Avalon and back to share cropping. He was looking after the two children from his first marriage and the third from his second, and worked hard to provide for them. IN addition to his field labour, he worked for the Works Progress Administration, part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, felling trees, building dams and levelling gravel roads, he also had a brief stint in a factory in Jacksonville, an hour away from Avalon. Just after the Second World War, John and his family moved into a three bedroom house on a farmer’s land in Avalon, tending the farmer’s cows in addition to his usual work.
In 1952, Folkways records included two of John’s 1928 recordings in their Anthology of American Folk Music series. Another track was released on an anthology of Mississippi Blues in 1963. This lead to a new audience for John’s music, a mainly white and educated audience seeking out the roots of folk and blues music performed by assumed to be long dead black artists. Two of these new fans were Dick Spottswood and his friend Tom Hoskins. They were captivated by John’s music, and researched as much as they could about him, which wasn’t very much. Dick found a tiny town named “Avalon” in an atlas published in 1878, and on a whim, and taking a cue from the lyrics on the 1928 recording of “Avalon Blues” where John sings “Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind”, Tom drove from New York to rural Mississippi to see what he could find about John’s life.
Arriving in the tiny town of Avalon in early 1963, 35 years after the songs were recorded, Tom asked men sitting outside the general store if anyone knew anything about John Hurt’s life. They told him to drive up the road about a mile, and stop at the third post box on the left. Tom did so, and found Mississippi John Hurt on the back of a tractor, ploughing the fields just as he had on the back of that mule 50 years earlier. Tom had a guitar with him and with a little encouragement, John showed that he still had the guitar skills and voice that had captivated a new audience.
Dick and Tom took John to Washington DC in March 1963, were he recorded 39 tracks, mainly new versions of his 1928 recordings, but including new songs like “Richland Woman Blues”. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his pocket knife to use as a slide on some of them. The record was titled “Mississippi John Hurt Folk Songs and Blues” and was an immediate success spearheading the Blues Revival. In July that year, aged 71, he played his first concert in over 30 years in front of 18,000 people at the Newport Folk Festival. He was a massive success, and then went back to Avalon to pick cotton for around $5 a day.
More concert appearances followed that year and the next, and another solo album was released in 1964 and he was included in albums recorded at the Newport Folk Festival. John was suddenly a massive commercial success, playing a residency in a coffee house for $200 a week, and earning more money he’d seen in his life through royalties. He bought a big house in Grenada, just 17 miles from Avalon. Another album followed in 1966 and was another success, and in February that year he recorded his final session in New York.
He returned to his house in Granada, and died peacefully in his sleep on November 2nd, 1966. Mississippi John Hurt was a gentle, peaceful man who accepted what came his way with calmness. He is unlike most other bluesmen of his time, preferring a simple life at home In Avalon rather than the rough and tumble life out on the road. When asked about his rediscovery and if he knew how good his music was, he replied “Yeah… I know it… and I been knowin’ it, but I never dreamed things would’ve turned out like they have…never dreamed it.” Mississippi John Hurt is buried just a few miles outside of Avalon.