The above photograph was taken in a town called Avalon, Mississippi, during the 1920s. At the time, Avalon was little more than a dilapidated railway settlement on the edge of the Mississippi Delta, with a population of less than a hundred. Today, if youʼre looking for images of the place as it was, your luck will be scarce. However, I have searched, and found that there are at least three images which do appear from Avalon during that era; that of a man, his house, and his grave.

The man of which I speak stands on the far right in this photo with the old brown fedora (which youʼll find is a constant fixture to his head). The children are his children, and one of the women is his wife. The house behind them you may even have visited, though you probably wouldnʼt recognise it today, for it has been reconditioned and now goes by the name of the ʻMississippi John Hurt Museum.ʼ Mississippi John Hurt is the name of the man in the photograph, the man who owned that house, and the man who put Avalon on the map.

Of course, at the time the above photograph was taken he was known simply as John Hurt. If you wandered through Avalon, you might have seen him out harvesting his 13 acres of cotton and corn (half of which would go to his landowner, as per their sharecropping arrangement), or jacking up and levelling railroad ties with a crew of men who worked for Illinois Central. Perhaps their ʻfield hollersʼ – vocal melodies which took the melodic form of a call-and-response, and from which the workers

gathered strength – caught your attention. John Hurt liked these tunes. When he was done for the day, heʼd use their strong steady rhythms, train-rhythms, on his guitar; thumbing them out as a bass line.

If you came in the evening, when worked ceased, you mightʼve seen John Hurt sitting on his veranda playing popular records to entertain his neighbours. If he wasnʼt doing that heʼd no

"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 Hurt, remembering his time working for Illinois Central

Mississippi John Hurt

doubt be at a house party, singing pop songs like “Good Morninʼ Miss Carrie” as his friends danced what he described as “two-steppinʼ” or “square” dances. If you came sometime after 1923 you might also have seen him working with a fiddler named Willie Narmour, who played “Carroll County [the county to which Avalon belonged] Blues.” Hurt took his guitar and was in charge of the rhythm, flat picking his parts in the bluegrass style. A few years later, when Narmour won a fiddle contest and a record contract, he remembered Hurtʼs flat-picking and recommended him to a man named T.J. Rockwell, who was to be responsible for the first recordings Mississippi John Hurt ever made.

However, before we get to Hurtʼs (short yet sweet) musical career, we have to go back to 1893 to a little town called Teoc, Mississippi, where John Hurt was born. (Though he later moved to and spent most of his life in the neighbouring town of Avalon.) There, John Smith Hurt, his eight brothers and two sisters grew up in poverty. However, before his father died and Hurt was forced to start working the fields to help his mother support the family, he managed to complete the fourth grade at St. James School. It was there that John Hurt met a local musician named William Carson, and his passion for music was born. "I wasn't allowed to bother Mr. Carson's guitar.” Hurt remembered, “[but] I would wait until he feel asleep at my house, then I would slip his guitar into my room and try to play. There I learned to play the guitar at the age of nine years old. After that, my mother bought me a second hand guitar at

the price of $1.50! I can tell you there was no beautiful sound than my own guitar music. I was playing for country dances [whilst] at the same time working very hard on a farm near Avalon Mississippi."

The style of playing Hurt developed on that $1.50 guitar was similar to that of the music around him, and no doubt he would have been influenced by the ragtime, ballads and blues integral to any Mississippi childhood, but with qualities that were uniquely his own. For instance, the intricate style of fingerpicking he favoured can easily be compared to that of his contemporary, Robert Johnson (also Mississippi born) and yet Hurtʼs style was more “linear and melodic” remarked American guitarist Ry [Ryland]

Cooder, than Johnsonʼs music and the music of most of those around him.

Blind Willie McTell, also of Hurtʼs generation and famed for his slide guitar work was another man who exerted an influence over Hurt, who copied his technique of using a pocketknife slide to imitate bells and quote familiar vocal

melodies. However, even here Hurtʼs music differs, for whilst the technique, when applied by

"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.'" - Mississippi John Hurt

Standing only 5”4,’ and with a face like an angel, Mississippi John Hurt sung in a gentle, guileless voice, and played guitar the same way. “Onstage, he would rock back and forth with a little smile,” remembers Stefan Grossman, and The New York

Times described his live performances as having “the quiet, introspective quality of chamber music."

McTell, often lent his songs a jarred, broken quality (and Iʼve no doubt thatʼs intentional), when used by Hurt it serves instead to highlight the amazing fluidity of his music, and emphasise how beautifully merged the guitar and vocal parts are: As Hurt starts dropping off the ends of familiar lines about half-way through the piece the audience barely notices; the vocal part is so repetitive (as most blues vocals are) that they already know the words by heart and can hear them in their head as they follow the guitarʼs melody which, in Hurtʼs songs, is almost always identical to that of the vocal melody anyway. The experience, for the listener, is a comforting feeling of ease and unity between the singer, his guitar and the audience.

However, if you were to take a very analytical approach towards Hurtʼs music you would find, on the outside at least, that his songs are quite simple: Whilst he composed in E, A, D and G, unlike most bluesmen at the time, Hurt preferred to work in the key of C. He would rest his right-hand ring and little finger on the face of the guitar, at the same time thumbing out alternating bass lines and, with his index and middle fingers, picking out lilting melodies. Each song would consist of one beautiful little melody, of medium length and intricate complexity, which would be played on a loop over that mesmerising bass. This melody was the same for both the guitar and the voice. You can best see Hurtʼs technique in action by watching the youtube video on the page this is linked: It focuses on his fingers as he performs, ʻYou Gotta Walk That Lonesome Valley,ʼ a spiritual piece much suited to Hurtʼs sweet voice. However, anyone who (like myself) has tried to play these songs will soon discover their beautiful complexity in the syncopated style of fingerpicking and unusual chord progressions found in each of them. Then, there are also those funny moments in Mississippi

John Hurt songs when all of a sudden the bass drops out, or shifts a little so itʼs not where itʼs supposed to be. “Every one of his arrangements has something unique” commented Steffan Grossman, who studied guitar with Hurt during the 1960s, and I agree with him. Itʼs the thing that – coupled with the feeling of calm and ease, that connection and sense of understanding Hurt is so easily able to establish between himself and his audience – makes the music of Mississippi John Hurt so unique.

That said, we can now begin to look at Hurtʼs musical career, which all up spanned no longer than ten years, and which can be divided up into two pre and post war periods. On Valentines Day 1928, John Hurt (or, as he now called himself, Mississippi John Hurt), headed off to Memphis with only a homemade business card and his

$1.50 guitar. He was leaving to attend a recording session with a man named Mr. T.J. Rockwell (who, if youʼll remember, heʼd met through the fiddler) in the city. 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." Although several songs were cut from the session, only a single OKeh 78 was officially issued: “Nobodyʼs Dirty Business,” a finger-style piece which showed off Hurtʼs unique style and, on the other side, “Frankie,” a traditional blues ballad which Hurt tweaked to pay

“I always tried to make my strings say just what I say. I grab it and go my way with it. Use my melody with it."

- Mississippi John Hurt

“Got to New York this mornin’ just about half-past nine,

“Got to New York this mornin’ just about half-past nine,

Hollerin’ one monrnin’ in Avalon, couldn’t hardly keep from cryin’”

Like most bluesmen, Mississippi John Hurt wrote mainly from his own experiences. However, he would

also write of his religion (for Hurt, like many African-Americans at the time, was a devoted Christian) creating his own music from age-old

hymns such as ‘Nearer My God to Thee,’ or featuring biblical characters in his songs.

homage to Blind Willie McTell with by adding the chilling line “dark was the night, cold was the ground” (used by McTell as the title to one of his most famous slide pieces.)

Hurt then returned to his farm for the harvest, but that December was back in the studio with Mr. Rockwell, this time in New York. There, they produced 16 songs, a mixture of spiritual and blues, over two recording sessions and all on the Okeh label.

After that, however, America entered the great Depression, and, like so many others, Hurt seemed to disappear completely. In the end it was only ʻAvalon Blues,ʼ one of the songs recorded during his December sessions, that enabled, in 1963 and at 70 years of age, his rediscovery. A man named Tom Hoskins had heard the song, was astounded and decided to follow the lyrics (which told of “Avalon, my home town”) and the clue in Hurtʼs stage name to track him down. Eventually, he found Mississippi John Hurt living in a simple shack in, surprise-surprise, Avalon Mississippi. Hurt had been working with cattle, cutting hay, and helping with cotton and corn harvests. When Hoskins invited him to start a new career in Washington D.C. he, “Thought he was the F.B.I” Hurt recalled, “When he asked me to come up North, I figured if I told him no, he'd take me anyway, so I said yes." For the next three years, Hurt and his family lived in Washington D.C where Hurt recorded dozens of songs, in between touring extensively and working as a resident guitarist at the Ontario Place coffeehouse, (where his take-home pay was ten times what he had once earnt working farms). When he had enough money for a home in Grenada, Hurt said his goodbyeʼs and went home to Mississippi. There, in 1966 and at 73 years of age, Mississippi John Hurt slipped quietly out of the world just as heʼd slipped quietly in, dying peacefully in his sleep.

Mississippi John Hurt had no problem playing to both African American and white audiences. However, having grown up during a time of intense separation between

blacks and whites, he couldn’t help being a little bemused and befuddled as, in the 1960s, he was approached, en mass, by white folk musicians who adored his music. This

photograph was taken in August 1964, Philadelphia.