Avalon Blues—Mississippi John Hurt
#365Songs: July 14
Here at No Wrong Notes, we’re a little past halfway through a year of song recommendations. Yes, it’s another annual edition of our #365Songs series, brought to you by Smitty (Michael Smith), Dr. J (James David Patrick), and yours truly (Preacher Boy).
Every year it’s a new adventure to experience how the series plays out, and I think it’s safe to say that this year has been the year of the #ThemeWeek.
I’m smack dab in the middle of a theme week myself as I write this. I’m doing “songs about hometowns.” I began with “My City Was Gone” by The Pretenders, “Back Home in Derry” by Christy Moore, and “Helpless” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
From there, I took a bit of a left turn and wrote about “Born and Raised in Compton” by DJ Quick.
Now, I’m going to shift a bit again with this next one, Mississippi John Hurt’s “Avalon Blues.”
Hometowns seem to hold a strange power over people. Their influences may wax and wane over the decades, but then right when you least expect it … BAM! Your hometown rears up and throws you for a loop. The past becomes present again.
For myself, I don’t really have a hometown. I mean, I was born in Iowa City, Iowa, but we left when I was still pretty young. I remember very little, and certainly some of what I think I remember is likely just my remembrances of what I’ve seen in home Super 8 movies.
I was born in a Quonset Hut that doesn’t exist anymore, so even the times I’ve been back there, there wasn’t much for me to see.
East Lansing, Michigan was a kind of a hometown for me, except that we left it so often to live elsewhere that I have a hard time feeling many connections to it. The few connections I do feel, however, are powerful ones. The Red Cedar River will always be the lifeblood of my childhood, and the train tracks that ran behind the old Quality Dairy remain one of the most important symbols writ upon the notebook of my soul.
But despite having notched some seminal early years in those two places, I wouldn’t call either a hometown and I’d never go out of my way to memorialize either as such. I certainly have no plans to return there for any length of time. In other words, if I ever fall off the grid, don’t go looking for me in Iowa or Michigan.
I say that, but as I do, I acknowledge I might come to rue that stance. Establishing your hometown for posterity can have its perks.
It certainly did for Mississippi John Hurt.
In 1923, John Hurt was a 30-year-old sharecropper who’d learned to play guitar some twenty years previous, and who entertained local family and friends at various parties and dances and such in his adopted hometown of Avalon, Mississippi. That year, he connected with a fiddle player named Willie Narmour, who needed a replacement guitarist for a gig. That connection would prove to be fortuitous. A few years later, Narmour won a recording session with Okeh Records, and in the process, he recommended Hurt to the label. In 1928, Hurt recorded 13 songs for Okeh:
Frankie
Nobody’s Dirty Business
Stack O’Lee Blues
Candy Man Blues
Blessed Be the Name
Praying On the Old Camp Ground
Blue Harvest Blues
Spike Driver Blues
Louis Collins
Got the Blues (Can’t Be Satisfied)
Ain’t No Tellin’
Avalon Blues
Big Leg Blues
Today, in 2024, there isn’t a single song from that collection that isn’t known and revered by pretty much every single blues and folk artist across the planet.
But in 1928, they largely fell on apathetic ears. They didn’t sell, and John Hurt went back to his life as a farmer, those few strange days recording in Memphis and New York fading dreamlike into the past.
In 1952, nearly a quarter of a century later, Harry Smith included a couple of Hurt’s recordings in his now-legendary Anthology of American Folk Music collection, and there was a wee bit of a Hurt buzz got up. Alas, it didn’t amount to anything, and Hurt never had any idea it had happened.
If you happen to have looked closely at that list above, you may have noted that one of the songs is the subject of this essay, “Avalon Blues.”
In 1963, Tom Hoskins was traveling near Avalon, Mississippi, and his friend, musicologist Dick Spottswood, asked him to go to Avalon and see if he could find anything out about Mississippi John Hurt.
The rest is history.
It’s a story that’s been told a thousand times over, so I won’t repeat it all here, but suffice it to say that the last 4 years of Hurt’s life were wildly different from the preceding 62. Thankfully, he lived long enough to know he was a legend.
And none of it would have been possible if it hadn’t been for him staking a claim to his hometown.
Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind
Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind
Pretty mama’s in Avalon, want me there all the time
~
Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!
