10 Things You Should Know About Mississippi John Hurt

Posted on | March 29, 2010 | No Comments

1. He was born in either July of 1893 or March of 1892.

2. He picked up his lifelong love of playing the guitar at age nine.

3. He spent his youth playing old-time finger-picking music for dances.

4. He worked as a farmhand into the 1920s, when he was auditioned and picked up by Okeh Records, who added the moniker Mississippi to his name as a selling gimmick.

5. The resulting records were a commercial failure, Okeh went out of business during the depression, and John Hurt returned to sharecropping in Mississippi.

6. In 1963, folk musicologist Tom Hoskins tracked down Hurt and seeing that he was still singing and playing for local parties and dances, talked Hurt into moving to Washington, DC and playing for a wider audience.

7. In 1964, Hurt played the Newport Folk Festival, and quickly became a favorite among the new folk and blues revivalists.

8. He played concert halls, coffeehouses, colleges and festivals, made an appearance on the Tonight Show and recorded three albums for Vanguard.

9. The soft-spoken country gentleman died of a heart attack in 1966 in Grenada, Mississippi.

10. Mississippi is now home to a John Hurt Memorial, a John Hurt Museum and the Mississippi John Hurt Music Festival.

If you already know his music, you know what a treasure Mississippi John Hurt left us. In case you don’t, here’s a glimpse of this extraordinary artist.

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10 Things You Should Know About Mississippi John Hurt

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