Mississippi John Hurt

Singer and guitarist Mississippi John Hurt is an anomaly among the blues legends who emerged from areas around the Mississippi Delta in the 1920s, in that his relaxed and mild-mannered style was derived from gospel, ragtime, and minstrel-show music as much as blues proper. Hurt was born in the early 1890s in the tiny town of Avalon, MS, where he began to work as a farmhand as a young child. By the 1920s, Hurt had made a name for himself locally as an entertainer. Through performing with popular local fiddle player Willie Narmour, Hurt found a path toward making his earliest recordings: a set of sides for Memphis-based OKeh Records, including originals (“Candy Man Blues,” “Got the Blues That Can’t Be Satisfied”) and singular arrangements of traditional ballads. The OKeh sessions languished in obscurity for decades before artist and record collector Harry Smith resurrected a couple of them for his cult-favorite 78s collection Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952. Increased interest in Hurt’s music inspired a successful search to find him by musicologist Dick Spottswood and blues enthusiast Tom Hoskins. Following this, Hurt made a series of high-profile appearances up north, including the Newport Folk Festival and Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, and became a benevolent presence in the New York folk scene. He also recorded several of the most revered albums of the folk-revival era during this time—most notably, 1966’s Today! Shortly after returning home to Mississippi that year, Hurt passed away of a heart attack. His adept fingerpicking style inspired guitarists across the folk scenes in America and the UK in the subsequent decades, and his compositions have been covered by Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Gillian Welch, Beck, and many others.