-Resource Guide

Biography

John Hurt (1893-1966)

No blues singer ever presented a more gentle, genial image than Mississippi John Hurt. A guitarist with an extraordinarily lyrical and refined fingerpicking style, he also sang with a warmth unique in the field of blues, and the gospel influence in his music gave it a depth and reflective quality unusual in the field. Coupled with the sheer gratitude and amazement that he felt over having found a mass audience so late in life, and playing concerts in front of thousands of people -- for fees that seemed astronomical to a man who had always made music a sideline to his life as a farm laborer -- these qualities make Hurt's recordings into a very special listening experience.

John Hurt grew up in the Mississippi hill country town of Avalon, population under 100, north of Greenwood, near Grenada. He began playing guitar in 1903, and within a few years was performing at parties, doing ragtime repertory rather than blues. As a farm hand, he lived in relative isolation, and it was only in 1916, when he went to work briefly for the railroad, that he got to broaden his horizons and his repertory beyond Avalon. In the early '20s, he teamed up with white fiddle player Willie Narmour, playing square dances. Hurt was spotted by a scout for Okeh Records who passed through Avalon in 1927, who was supposed to record Narmour, and was signed to record after a quick audition. Of the eight sides that Hurt recorded in Memphis in February of 1928, only two were ever released, but he was still asked to record in New York late in 1928.

Hurt's dexterity as a guitarist, coupled with his plain-spoken nature, were his apparent undoing, at least as a popular blues artist, at the time. His playing was too soft and articulate, and his voice too plain to be taken up in a mass setting, such as a dance; rather, his music was best heard in small, intimate gatherings. In that sense, he was one of the earliest blues musicians to rely completely on the medium of recorded music as a vehicle for mass success; where the records of Furry Lewis or Blind Blake were mere distillations of music that they (presumably) did much better on-stage, in John Hurt's case the records were good representations of what he did best. Additionally, Hurt never regarded himself as a blues singer, preferring to let his relatively weak voice speak for itself with none of the gimmicks that he might've used, especially in the studio, to compensate. And he had no real signature tune with which he could be identified, in the way that Furry Lewis had "Kassie Jones" or "John Henry." Not that Hurt didn't have some great numbers in his song bag: "Frankie," "Louis Collins," "Avalon Blues," "Candy Man Blues," "Big Leg Blues," and "Stack O' Lee Blues," were all brilliant and unusual as blues, in their own way, and highly influential on subsequent generations of musicians. They didn't sell in large numbers at the time, however, and as Hurt never set much store on a musical career, he was content to make his living as a hired hand in Avalon, living on a farm and playing for friends whenever the occasion arose.

Mississippi John Hurt might've lived and died in obscurity, if it hadn't been for the folk music revival of the late '50s and early '60s. A new generation of listeners and scholars suddenly expressed a deep interest in the music of America's hinterlands, not only in listening to it but finding and preserving it. A scholar named Tom Hoskins discovered that Mississippi John Hurt, who hadn't been heard from musically in over 35 years, was alive and living in Avalon, MS, and sought him out, following the trail laid down in Hurt's song "Avalon Blues." Their meeting was a fateful one; Hurt was in his 70s, and weary from a lifetime of backbreaking labor for pitifully small amounts of money, but his musical ability was intact, and he bore no ill-will against anyone who wanted to hear his music. A series of concerts were arranged, including an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, where he was greeted as a living legend. This opened up a new world to Hurt, who was grateful to find thousands, or even tens of thousands of people too young to have even been born when he made his only records up to that time, eager to listen to anything he had to sing or say. A tour of American universities followed as did a series of recordings: first in a relatively informal, non-commercial setting intended to capture him in his most comfortable and natural surroundings, and later under the auspices of Vanguard Records, with folk singer Patrick Sky producing. It was 1965, and Mississippi John Hurt had found a mass audience for his songs 35 years late. He took the opportunity, playing concerts and making new records of old songs as well as material he'd never before laid down; whether he eventually put down more than a portion of his true repertory will probably never be clear, but Hurt did leave a major legacy of his and other peoples' songs, in a style that barely skipped a beat from his late-'20s Okeh sides.

As with many people to whom success comes late in life, certain aspects of the success were hard for him to absorb in stride; the money was more than he'd ever hoped to see, even if it wasn't much by the standards of a major pop star; 1,000 dollar concert fees were something he'd never even pondered having to deal with. What he did most easily was sing and play; Vanguard got out a new album, Today!, in 1966, from his first sessions for the label. Additionally, the tape of a concert that Hurt played at Oberlin College in April of 1965 was released under the title The Best of Mississippi John Hurt; the 21-song live album was just that, even if it wasn't made up of previously released work (more typical of a "best-of" album), a perfect record of a beautiful performance in which the man did old and new songs in the peak of his form. Hurt got in one more full album, The Immortal Mississippi John Hurt, released posthumously, but even better was the record assembled from his final sessions, Last Sessions, also issued after his death; these songs broke new lyrical ground, and showed Hurt's voice and guitar to be as strong as ever, just months before his death.

Mississippi John Hurt left behind a legacy unique in the annals of the blues, and not just in terms of music. A humble, hard-working man who never sought fame or fortune from his music, and who conducted his life in an honest and honorable manner, he also avoided the troubles that afflicted the lives of many of his more tragic fellow musicians. He was a pure musician, playing for himself and the smallest possible number of listeners, developing his guitar technique and singing style to please nobody but himself; and he suddenly found himself with a huge following, precisely because of his unique style. Unlike contemporaries such as Skip James, he felt no bitterness over his late-in-life mass success, and as a result continued to please and win over new listeners with his recordings until virtually the last weeks of his life. Nothing he ever recorded was less than inspired, and most of it was superb.

Bruce Eder - All Music Guide

The following article borrowed from Hurt and the Delta Blues site.

Mississippi John Hurt
By Jas Obrecht

Songster and bluesman, John Hurt had a beautifully syncopated fingerpicking style and a gentle, guileless voice. After making a handful of 78s, he faded from view during the Depression and then arose phoenix-like during the 1960s, his considerable skills intact. Still fresh today, his recordings provide an aural passport to a bygone era of cakewalks and rags, parables and polite society.

Hurt was 35 years old when he journeyed alone, a beat-up guitar and business card in hand, from the Mississippi hill country to Memphis for his first session. It was Valentine's Day, 1928, and the experience was not entirely pleasant. Hurt remembered going into "a great big hall with only Mr. Rockwell, one engineer, and myself. I sat on a chair and they pushed the microphone right up close to my mouth, and told me not to move after they found the right position. Oh, I was nervous, and my neck was sore for days after." Several songs were cut that day, but only a single OKeh 78 was issued from the session, "Nobody's Dirty Business" backed by "Frankie," one of his songs in open tuning. Hurt was paid about $20 per song, a good fee for unproven talent. The original note on Columbia's file cards for the matrixes "old time music" was later changed to "race."

Hurt headed home and worked another season; under his sharecropping arrangement, half of the corn and cotton he grew on 13 acres was turned over to the land owner. In November T.J. Rockwell wrote Hurt, inviting him to record again. John's December 21st session in New York City produced brilliant takes of "Ain't No Tellin'" (essentially new words set to the "Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor" melody), the murder ballad "Louis Collins," and "Avalon Blues," set to a galloping, train-like rhythm.

On December 28, 1928, Hurt was back in the studio for his final and most productive prewar session, cutting three spirituals and five blues. Of all Hurt's prewar sides, the one he composed his first day in New York, "Avalon Blues," proved to be the most important. Nearly three decades after its release, it led to his rediscovery:

Avalon my home town, always on my mind, Avalon my home town, always on my mind, Pretty mama's in Avalon, want me there all the time

During the 1920s, when its population was less than a hundred, Avalon, Mississippi, was little more than a ramshackle rail settlement on the edge of the Delta between Greenwood and Grenada. Born in nearby Teoc in 1892, John Smith Hurt spent most of his life living there in poverty. He had eight brothers and two sisters and made it through the fourth grade at St. James School. He then began laboring for Felix Healey, whom he described as "a colored man" who owned a place across the way from his.

Inspired by a local musician named William Henry Carson, John was nine when he began teaching himself to play on a secondhand guitar his mother had bought him for a dollar and a half. "I always tried to make my strings say just what I say," he explained to Tom Hoskins during the early '60s. "I grab it and go my way with it. Use my melody with it." Resting his right-hand ring and little fingers on the face of his guitar, Hurt thumbed mesmerizing alternating bass lines while his index and middle fingers picked lilting melodies.

By age 12 John was singing "Good Mornin' Miss Carrie," "Satisfied," "Frankie And Johnny," and other non-blues songs at house parties, sometimes working with a fiddler. "We had dances," he told Hoskins. "We called them square dances. Hands up four. Ten Gallons. Oh, I don't know what you call these little dances, why, they two-steppin'." Like the state's most famous string band, the Mississippi Sheiks, and itinerant bluesman such as Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines, Hurt played for both African American and white audiences.

Some nights, he remembered, he and a pal would awaken neighbors with their playing: "We go along to people's private homes, way in the night, midnight, one o'clock. 'Serenadin',' we call it. We knew you well, we tip up on the porch and we'd wake you up with music. Well, you might lay there and listen, you might not get up and ask us in. Sometimes you'd get up and say, 'Come on in.'"

Asked about the first blues he'd learned, Hurt played "Lazy Blues," a simple, original arrangement in E major that had more in common with Memphis players than Delta musicians such as Robert Johnson:

Wake up in the morning, a towel tied round her head, Wake up in the morning, towel tied round her head, When you speak to her, she swear she almost dead

Besides ragtime, ballads, and blues, what were Hurt's musical roots? "Who knows?" conjectures Ry Cooder. "Here's a guy from Mississippi who's playing in an un-Mississippi style. It's very linear and melodic. What did he hear? He must have heard geechie music, and maybe he heard stuff that came up from the Piedmont area. Maybe he thought it up by himself." During "Talking Casey," Hurt used a pocketknife slide to imitate bells and quote familiar melodies, a technique similar to Blind Willie McTell in Atlanta and many others while thumbing train rhythms on his bass strings. He composed in many keys,E, A, D, and G, which was especially convenient for a strong alternating bass, but unlike many Delta musicians seemed to prefer C, his key for "Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor," "Nobody's Dirty Business," "Richlands Women Blues," "Louis Collins," "Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me," "Corinne, Corinna," and "My Creole Belle," among others.

Much of Hurt's music was probably a souvenir of his childhood. Asked by a white landlord how he created melodies, Hurt responded, "Well, sir, I just make it sound like I think it ought to."

After his father passed away, John helped his mother raise cotton, corn, and potatoes. He continued to hire himself out to neighboring farms, while his mother washed clothes and cooked. During 1915 Hurt worked for the Illinois Central, jacking up and leveling railroad ties for $100 a month. His crew, he remembered, kept pace to a work-song rhythm: "Just one man keepin' time. Verses like 'Ida when you marry, I want you to marry me/Like a flower held, baby, you never see', like that. I learned 'Spike Driver Blues' from a railroad hand called Walter Jackson. I just learned that song from calling track. 'Casey Jones' too." John quit the IC after five months, going back to help his mother on the farm. To earn extra money, he cut and hewed oak, pine, and cypress trees into eight- foot cross ties to sell to the railroad at a dollar apiece. It was grueling work, he remembered: "I towed many a cross ties I made across my shoulder."

Around 1923 Willie Narmour, a white square dance fiddler whose "Carroll County Blues" is still in the repertoire of many old-time musicians, began using Hurt as a substitute for his regular partner, Shell William Smith. Relegated to the role of rhythm keeper, Hurt flatpicked his parts. A few years later, Narmour won a fiddle contest; first prize was a chance to record for OKeh Records. Arriving in Avalon to take Narmour to his field recording equipment in Memphis, producer T.J. Rockwell inquired about other local musicians. Narmour recommended Hurt and showed the OKeh executive to his shack. Hurt auditioned with "Monday Morning Blues," which led to his Valentine's day session. The "Mississippi" tag was added to his name as a sales gimmick.

Hurt had chance encounters with three famous blues personalities during his follow-up recording trip to New York City. He saw Bessie Smith holding a guitar while waiting for an elevator and met Victoria Spivey in the hall outside a studio. "At that time they had a large recordin' room," he told Hoskins, "and they had a hallway between these buildings. They keep the door closed, you could hear nothin'. It was a glass door, bottom was wood, and you could ease up to the door and peek through. If you lay your head close upside the door, you could hear like somebody way across town. But you weren't goin' to get in there till your time comes, see?"

In Memphis Hurt had met a man passing himself off as Lonnie Johnson, but on December 28, 1928, he met the real Lonnie Johnson: "He had did some recordin' just ahead of me. Me and Lonnie, we was in the recordin' room there. I had just written this 'Candy Man.' I had it written in pencil, and I forget some of the verses, so they typed them on the chart. So I was practicin' on it while they were gone. And Lonnie says, 'Ain't that a little too high? Gotta let it down, son.' I'll never forget the manager, T.J. Rockwell, come in and says, 'Whose been messin' with that chart?' Lonnie says, 'I did. I didn't think it would do any harm, it was too high.' That's how I know it was for sure Lonnie Johnson. We had us a little ball while we were goin'. I played the guitar, and he played the piano, oh, nice little ball. We went shoppin' or to his house, have a little party, dance. Oh yeah, had a big time." During the week in between his studio appearances, Hurt saved most of his $10 per diem by taking room and board at the home of the man assigned to deliver him to a hotel.

With his return to Avalon, John Hurt settled into a quiet rural life with his bride Jessie Lee, whom he had married in 1927. His records had little immediate impact on his career, but he still played Saturday night dances around Avalon, Carrollton, and Greenwood, sometimes working with fiddler Lee Anderson. During the Depression Hurt worked for the WPA, earning three dollars a day felling trees, building dams and levees, and cutting gravel roads. His WPA schedule of seven days on followed by seven days off enabled him to continue farming.

John Hurt never learned to drive a car and lived without electricity most of his life. Around the end of World War II he moved his family into a three-room house on A.R. Perkins' land, where he tended cows, filed hoes, and farmed until the 1960s.

Unbeknownst to Hurt, Folkways Records re-released two of his old 78 sides in the early '50s as part of its American Folk Music series, and he had gained a new circle of admirers who marveled at his appealing voice and dexterous fingerpicking. Most figured he was long dead, but Dick Spottswood had his doubts. He found Avalon on an atlas and shared his research with Tom Hoskins, who was on his way to New Orleans. Locals at Stinson's store directed Hoskins to the third mailbox up the hill, where, sure enough, dwelled Mr. Hurt. At the time, John was working with cattle, cutting hay, and helping with cotton and corn harvests. Hoskins was thrilled to discover that Hurt's musical skills were intact, and he talked him into coming to Washington, D.C., to begin a new career. "I thought he was the F.B.I.," Hurt remembered. "When he asked me to come up North, I figured if I told him no, he'd take me anyway, so I said yes."

On July 15, 1963, Dick Spottswood took Hurt to Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress to recut some of his 1920s sides and recreate the secular songs and spirituals of his youth. Hurt recorded 39 songs that day, pulling out his pocketknife for the slide effects in "Talking Casey Jones" and "Pera-Lee." Asked to play his favorite song, he launched into "Trouble I've Had It All My Days." Before quitting, Hurt said, "Let me do this one for you before we go. It's a love song, see?" John dedicated "Waiting For You" to his wife Jessie.

Mississippi John Hurt soon produced commercial recordings and, at age 69, gave his first major concert appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963. The lamb went over like a lion, graciously received his fans, and headed home to pick cotton for four dollars a day. A month later, he triumphed at the Philadelphia Folk Festival.

With his angelic, wizened face and diminutive size, 5'4", without the old brown fedora, Mississippi John Hurt was as folkish and non-harrowing as his music, and he rapidly became a cultural hero. "Hurt wasn't just a good musician," noted Dick Spottswood, "he had something which was very important in the 1960s. He had old record credentials, and he had been a legend for years. The myth was accessible instantly, and he had the music to back it up." Rave reviews rolled in: "The most important rediscovered folk singer to come out of Mississippi's Delta country, the traditional home of Negro country blues singers" described Time, while Down Beat characterized him as "warm, gentle, wistful, quietly pulsant and wholly musical. The guitar work is stunningly complex." The New York Times praised his "compelling artistry" and added, "His performances have the quiet, introspective quality of chamber music." He even appeared on The Tonight Show.

Musicians who knew Mississippi John Hurt in the '60s often describe him as a wise and gentle man. "John Hurt was very Christ-like and perfect," remembers Stefan Grossman, who studied guitar with him. "He had a repertoire of about 80 tunes, all of them gems. He was more of a songster than a blues musician, with a near-perfect guitar style. Onstage, he would rock back and forth with a little smile, very unlike someone like Son House. He was incredible, the storybook grandfather full of wise tales and wonderful stories." Then and now, countless guitarists have attempted to master John's so-called "effortless" fingerpicking, which he was graciously willing to demonstrate to anyone who asked. "To a beginner," Grossman details, "John Hurt seems really simple. He's playing like a piano, with treble on top of a boom-chick, boom-chick bass. But when you dissect them, every one of his arrangements has something unique, he'll stop the bass, or the bass isn't where you'd expect it to be. He has unusual chord positions. He'd play set arrangements, but there would be little variations each time.

"The Newport Festival wanted to buy John Hurt a guitar, so he came up to Marc Silber's Fretted Instrument Shop. We showed him a Martin OO-42, expensive guitars with pearl inlays. And he just went for a simple Guild guitar that he picked off the wall. It was nothing special, not even a great-sounding guitar. It was very modest, just like he was. For his studio sessions on Vanguard, he used my OM-45 Martin, which happened to be an incredible sounding guitar. You can hear the difference between those recordings and the live Vanguard album that he did with the Guild."

In September 1963 John, Jessie, and their grandchildren Ella Mae and Andrew Lee moved to Washington, D.C., where they stayed in a third floor apartment in a row house on Rhode Island Avenue N.W. until their return to Grenada. Rory Block was among those who made the pilgrimage to visit Hurt in D.C. "Mississippi John had recorded way back in the days of intense separatism," she says, "and then all of a sudden he was rediscovered by young white people, and he couldn't help but wonder what was going on. He never expected that anyone would be listening to his music again, especially young white people, whom he never thought would be interested in his music! He appreciated it, though. He was very quiet, very thoughtful, and very sweet. He wanted to make sure you were comfortable, that you had a cup of coffee."

Between concert appearances around the country, John worked as resident guitarist at the Ontario Place coffeehouse. His take-home pay jumped tenfold from his sharecropping wage to $200 a week. He recorded Piedmont's Volume One Of A Legacy during March '63 and taped Worried Blues on an Ampeg reel-to-reel machine the following February at the Ontario Place. His July '64 reappearance at Newport was released by Vanguard. He taped the label's two-album The Best Of Mississippi John Hurt in concert at Oberlin College on April 15, 1965. When his bookings and albums brought him enough revenue to buy a house in Grenada, Hurt packed up his guitar and headed for Mississippi. "By rights," Jessie insisted, "John went into this when he ought've been coming out." Mississippi John Hurt paid his final visit to New York City during the summer of '66, cutting for Vanguard. "He got uncomfortable with people fighting to control his recording," Grossman details, "so he went back home and died in his sleep. He came in gently, left gently." Mississippi John Hurt passed away on November 2, 1966, and was buried a few miles north of A.R. Perkins' house in rural Carroll County. His only son, John William "Man" Hurt, still lives in Grenada, where he performs pieces popularized by his father and '50s-style juke blues by John Lee Hooker and Howlin' Wolf.

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