Mississippi John Hurt
Mississippi John Hurt (1893–1966) was a singer and fingerpicking guitarist from Avalon, in Carroll County, Mississippi, who made a handful of records for OKeh in 1928 and then spent thirty-five years farming and playing for his neighbors. Found again in 1963, he spent his last three years as a popular performer on the folk-revival circuit and recorded for Piedmont, the Library of Congress and Vanguard.
John Smith Hurt was born in Teoc, Mississippi, and grew up in nearby Avalon. He was born in the early 1890s. He began playing the guitar at about nine, using three fingers, and by his twenties he was playing for parties and square dances, sometimes with the white fiddler Willie Narmour. His early repertoire leaned more toward country, pop and ragtime songs than toward the blues.
Narmour, who had a contract with OKeh, recommended him to the label, and the producer Tommy Rockwell heard him play “Monday Morning Blues” at home before bringing him to Memphis. On 14 February 1928 Hurt recorded eight sides there, singing to his own guitar, and only two were issued, “Frankie” and “Nobody’s Dirty Business” (OKeh 8560). A first “Casey Jones” was among those left on the shelf. OKeh then brought him to New York, where on 21 and 28 December 1928 he cut “Stack O’Lee Blues,” “Candy Man Blues,” “Spike Driver Blues,” “Louis Collins,” “Avalon Blues” and others. The records sold only modestly, and he went home to Avalon.
For most of the next thirty-five years he farmed, with spells in a factory in Jackson, at a gravel pit, on the Illinois Central Railroad and for the Works Progress Administration, and he kept playing at house parties, picnics and the Valley Store in Avalon. In 1952 Harry Smith put his “Frankie” and “Spike Driver Blues” on the Anthology of American Folk Music, which made collectors curious about him.
In 1963 the words of “Avalon Blues” led the record collector Tom Hoskins to Avalon, where he found Hurt still working as a farmhand, and Hoskins arranged for him to move to Washington, D.C. On 24, 26 and 29 March and 2 April 1963 Pete Kuykendall, Peter Silitch and Sandy Fisher recorded him for Folk Songs and Blues, produced by Dick Spottswood for Piedmont (PLP 13157) and released that August. He played a twelve-string guitar on its “Casey Jones.” That July he played the Newport Folk Festival, and he also recorded at length for the Library of Congress. Kuykendall recorded a second Piedmont album, Worried Blues, at the Wynwood studio in March 1964.
For three years he toured colleges, coffeehouses, concert halls and festivals, and he appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and on Pete Seeger’s television series Rainbow Quest. His later studio and live albums were made for Vanguard under the folksinger Patrick Sky, among them Today! (1966). His last sessions, at a New York hotel in February and July 1966, were issued in 1972 as Last Sessions. In 1965 he moved to Grenada, Mississippi, where he died on 2 November 1966.
The Lovin’ Spoonful took their name from a line in his “Coffee Blues,” and Tom Paxton, who had shared a bill with him at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village, recorded “Did You Hear John Hurt?” in 1977. In 1999 his granddaughter Mary Frances Hurt founded the Mississippi John Hurt Foundation, which opened a museum in Avalon and holds a yearly festival in his name.
