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.
Copyright, Jas Obrecht 1995. All rights reserved.
