Mississippi
John Hurt: Avalon Blues (Columbia/Legacy CK 64986)
The repetitively pulsed guitar, surely ornamented/counterposed
by descending/alternating bass lines, amidst delicate
treble filligrees, draws you in, inexorably... And that
voice, a gently-insinuating melodic croak - for want of
any better description - which seems to embody an older,
much slower, rural world that has past. The world will
never give us another such...a songster homebody whose
gentleness touched everyone who ever met him and, indeed,
anyone who has ever heard his music...and, so, we should
remember to treasure what we have left, now the man has
gone...
And, while he never cut a bad record in his life, this
set - his complete 1928 recordings - is his finest...and,
well-recorded, what’s more, unlike much of the finest
1920s music. The jewel in the crown, undoubtedly, is the
opener here - “Frankie”, one of the earliest
recorded versions of the ballad “Frankie & Albert”
(Johnnie, to be sure, was merely a later name change).
And, in its astounding virtuosity, flawlessly interweaving
multiple lines w/propulsive power, it clearly influenced
John Fahey’s work, as he himself freely admitted.
But, as this should well suggest, Hurt is no typical
Mississippi bluesman. In fact and, contra this package,
he’s actually no “bluesman” at all...albeit
he does play some blues. For, before blues was invented,
at the beginning of the 20th Century, skilled musicians
prided themselves on their versatility, and whilst they
played many ballads - such as “Frankie & Albert”
& “John Henry” - that exerted a formative
influence on blues, as it developed, they were songsters,
rather than bluesman...and John Hurt was undoubtedly one
of their number...
However, he was rare in that his was primarily a domestic
music for, unlike most, he did not travel, and made his
living as a farmer rather than as a musician. And, it
is this which allowed him to develop a softer, more intricate
(and intimate) style, since he did not have to project
over the raucous noise of the dance. There may have been
others, similarly gifted, who also shunned the dangerous
life on the roads & developed their music in a comparable
fashion...but, if so, they did not survive to be “re-discovered”
in the sixties, and we can only guess how they might have
played.
For Hurt was a unique artist, a technically-gifted songster
w/a marvellously winning, yet fragile, voice, and a guitar
style that has no close kinship to any other...albeit
it has since spawned countless descendents.
Buy it...and, once you’ve fallen in love w/it, then
(please) play it for your grandparents...and they will
love it too. Gentle, accessible music is rarely this great...
John Henry Calvinist
