Mississippi John Hurt

The farmer from Avalon

Mississippi John Hurt recorded for OKeh in 1928, went home to Avalon when the Depression killed the record business, and spent the next thirty-five years farming, doing odd jobs and tending cattle, playing for neighbours on the porch of a country store. He was about seventy when a young collector from Washington walked up to his door, guided by nothing more than the words of an old record. In the three years he had left, he became one of the best-loved performers of the American folk revival.

His music sounds nothing like the hard, hollering Delta blues of his state. He sang softly, almost conversationally, and played with a light, rolling touch: a steady alternating bass from his thumb and a separate melody picked above it, so that one guitar sounds like two. His repertoire was a songster's, not only blues but ballads, rags, hymns and dance tunes, including some of the oldest story songs in the Black Southern tradition.

Young guitarists in Greenwich Village and on college campuses studied that style note for note, and it became one of the foundations of folk fingerpicking. His warmth did the rest. Audiences who had come for a piece of history found a funny, modest man who thanked them, one by one, between sets.

Worth knowing

Ten things about Mississippi John Hurt

1. He taught himself at nine.

   According to the Mississippi Blues Trail, he began playing guitar at the age of nine, and his style was largely his own invention.

2. A fiddler got him his first session.

   Willie Narmour, a white fiddler from Carroll County who had recorded for OKeh, recommended him to the label's producer Tommy Rockwell in 1928.

3. His records outlived his career.

   Harry Smith put "Frankie" and "Spike Driver Blues" on the Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952. A generation of young folk musicians knew his playing before anyone knew if he was alive.

4. He borrowed the guitar for his comeback.

   When Tom Hoskins found him in March 1963, the first new recordings were made the next day, on a guitar Hoskins lent him.

5. He recorded more than sixty songs and stories for the Library of Congress.

   In July 1963, in the Coolidge Auditorium in Washington, he played and talked for the archive's folklorists.

6. A band named itself after his coffee song.

   The Lovin' Spoonful took their name from a line in his "Coffee Blues". John Sebastian had played with him in New York.

7. Doc Watson called him "Uncle John".

   Doc and Merle Watson counted him among their main influences, according to his granddaughter Mary Frances Hurt.

8. He played the Tonight Show.

   The farmer from Avalon appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and on Pete Seeger's television series Rainbow Quest.

9. His mother had been enslaved.

   His granddaughter writes that his mother, Mary Jane McCain, was born into slavery, and that the family name came from the McCain family who had owned her.

10. One of his albums is in the National Recording Registry.

    His 1966 Vanguard album Today! was added by the Library of Congress in 2009.

Life in brief

Avalon, New York, Avalon, Washington

1. 1893Born John Smith Hurt in Teoc, Mississippi, according to family records; some sources give 1892, and the exact date is uncertain. He grows up a few miles away in Avalon, in the hill country of Carroll County.
2. 1928OKeh sessions. In Memphis on February 14 he records "Frankie" and "Nobody's Dirty Business". In December he goes to New York and records "Avalon Blues", "Candy Man Blues", "Stack O' Lee Blues" and more.
3. 1929Home to Avalon. The Depression ends the record boom, and for thirty-five years he sharecrops and works where he can.
4. 1952Harry Smith's Anthology reissues two of his 1928 sides to a new audience.
5. 1963Found. In March, Tom Hoskins arrives in Avalon. In July he plays the Newport Folk Festival and records at the Library of Congress. His first new album appears on the Piedmont label.
6. 1964On the circuit: coffee houses, colleges, festivals and television, based in Washington, D.C.
7. 1966Vanguard releases Today! He returns to Mississippi, and dies of a heart attack in Grenada on November 2. He is buried at St. James Cemetery near Avalon.
8. 2009Today! enters the National Recording Registry.

A song as a road map

Found by his own song

By the early 1960s, collectors in the folk revival treated the 1920s blues singers almost as archaeology. Their records changed hands for serious money, and almost nothing was known about the people who made them. Most were assumed to be dead.

In Washington, the collector Dick Spottswood and his friend Tom Hoskins were listening to Hurt's "Avalon Blues", a homesick song he had recorded in New York in December 1928, in which he names Avalon as his home town and says it is always on his mind. The singer was billed as Mississippi John Hurt, so the town was presumably in Mississippi. Hoskins learned that there had once been a railroad stop of that name in Carroll County, and in March 1963 he drove down to look.

Within months he was in Washington, recording for the Library of Congress and preparing for Newport, where the festival crowd greeted him as a living legend. His return opened the floodgates. Within about a year, other searchers had found Son House and Skip James, and the "rediscovery" of the 1920s bluesmen became one of the great stories of the decade.

Start here

Songs to hear, and where they went

• 1928 Frankie The old ballad of Frankie and her faithless man, told at a gentle trot. It was one of his two Anthology tracks, and Bob Dylan recorded the song as "Frankie & Albert", the opening track of Good as I Been to You (1992). Bob Dylan 1992
• 1928 Avalon Blues The homesick song that worked as an address. Without it, his second career might never have happened.
• 1928 Candy Man Blues A risqué comic song about a ladies' man, sung with a perfectly straight face. Donovan recorded it as "Candy Man" on Fairytale. Donovan 1965
• 1928 Stack O' Lee Blues The ballad of Lee Shelton, the St. Louis man who shot Billy Lyons on Christmas night 1895 in an argument over a hat. Fred Waring's band and Ma Rainey were among those who recorded it before him, but blues scholars count Hurt's as the definitive early version. Lloyd Price's rock-and-roll "Stagger Lee" went to number one in 1959. Lloyd Price 1959
• 1928 Spike Driver Blues A John Henry song in all but name, built on a single chord that his moving guitar line makes easy to miss. His second Anthology track, later recorded by Doc Watson and many others.
• 1928 Louis Collins A tender murder ballad whose real Louis Collins has never been identified.

Why he matters

The quiet giant of the folk revival

Hurt's 1963 comeback lasted barely three years, but it put his style into the hands of a generation. Through the Anthology and then in person, he reached the Greenwich Village players around Dave Van Ronk, John Sebastian and Happy Traum, and the guitarist John Fahey, whose "American primitive" style grew partly from those two 1952 reissues. His songs have since been recorded by Bob Dylan, Doc Watson, Taj Mahal, Jerry Garcia, Beck, Gillian Welch and Rory Block, among many others.

What they learned from him was a way of playing: an independent, rock-steady thumb under a singing melody, unhurried and clean, with nothing wasted.

The best single place to hear the late Hurt is Today!, the 1966 Vanguard album now in the National Recording Registry. It mixes seven of his own songs, among them "Candy Man", "Coffee Blues" and "Louis Collins", with traditional pieces such as "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor", "Corrina, Corrina", "Spike Driver Blues" and the hymn "Beulah Land", and makes them all sound like one man's music. Asked what kind of music he played, he liked to say that he played whatever sounded good.

Avalon remembers him. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker stands outside an old country store near Avalon, beside a state historical marker on Highway 7, and in 2023 a new marker was unveiled at the cemetery where he rests. His granddaughter Mary Frances Hurt founded the Mississippi John Hurt Foundation to keep the music and the place connected.