Mississippi John Hurt

His Life, His Times, His Blues

Philip R. Ratcliffe

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781628469790
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Winner, Best History, 2012 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research When Mississippi John Hurt (1892-1966) was "rediscovered" by blues revivalists in 1963, his musicianship and recordings transformed popular notions of prewar country blues. At seventy-one he moved to Washington, D.C., from Avalon, Mississippi, and became a live-wire connection to a powerful, authentic past. His intricate and lively style made him the most sought after musician among the many talents the revival brought to light. Mississippi John Hurt provides this legendary creator's life story for the first time. Biographer Philip Ratcliffe traces Hurt's roots to the moment his mother Mary Jane McCain and his father Isom Hurt were freed from slavery. Anecdotes from Hurt's childhood and teenage years include the destiny-making moment when his mother purchased his first guitar for $1.50 when he was only nine years old. Stories from his neighbors and friends, from both of his wives, and from his extended family round out the community picture of Avalon. US census records, Hurt's first marriage record in 1916, images of his first autographed LP record, and excerpts from personal letters written in his own hand provide treasures for fans. Ratcliffe details Hurt's musical influences and the origins of his style and repertoire. The author also relates numerous stories from the time of his success, drawing on published sources and many hours of interviews with people who knew Hurt well, including the late Jerry Ricks, Pat Sky, Stefan Grossman and Max Ochs, Dick Spottswood, and the late Mike Stewart. In addition, some of the last photographs taken of the legendary musician are featured for the first time in Mississippi John Hurt.

1. The Early Years

From Slavery to Freedom

Outside of rural Mississippi, only a small group of music aficionados had heard of Mississippi John Hurt until after he turned seventy-one years old. This knowledge was confined to the music on six 78 rpm records made in 1928. When he was rediscovered in rural Mississippi in 1963, no one knew much about him or what he had been doing since 1928, and not many cared. His early records had made him an icon, but the story of the man himself would turn out to be even more deserving of such a reputation. Mississippi John Hurt emerged from rural Mississippi in his later years to affect very many people through both his music and his deeply spiritual personal philosophy.

Mississippi John Hurt was an African American. His parents named him John Smith Hurt. His ancestors were forcibly captured and transported across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to become slaves on the cotton and tobacco plantations of the Deep South. The European ancestors of the white Americans who would come to own the slaves also crossed the Atlantic, following a parallel course to the north. These Europeans eagerly anticipated the exciting challenges of life in the New World, while further south, in despicable and brutal conditions, the slaves had little idea of what was in store for them. They anticipated the worst and that is what they got.

The Hurts who came to own the ancestors of John Hurt’s father, Isom, were probably among the hundreds of Hurt immigrants that arrived in America between 1740 and 1840. Their destinations were mainly New York, Virginia, Baltimore, and New Orleans. They came from all over Europe (the name is of Anglo-Saxon origin) with many coming from Britain, mainly Liverpool, and many from Germany.¹ The British industrial revolution was under way and the transport of cotton eastward facilitated the transport of slaves westward. In the 1790s, when much of Mississippi was impenetrable forest, most slaves were landed on the East Coast at the same places as the European immigrants and were progressively moved westward with their owners.

The introduction of the cotton gin in 1793 led to an increase in cotton production from 3,000 bales to 100,000 bales per year by 1801, leading to an enormous increase in the demand for slaves to tend the crops.² White families of Hurts dispersed westward and settled across the southern states, mostly in Virginia and Georgia with some in Alabama and Mississippi, where they established farms and plantations and bought slaves.³

Long before these immigrants settled in the Deep South, Native Americans occupied the land. The Choctaw people occupied the central portion of the present state of Mississippi,⁴ which included the hill and Delta areas around what was to become Avalon in Carroll County and where John Smith Hurt was to be raised. In spite of their allegiance to the U.S. government, the Choctaw were betrayed by whites and removed from Mississippi and the southeastern United States following the Indian Removal Act of 1830.⁵ Tens of thousands of Choctaw were deported from their homeland. In the winter of 1831–32, the coldest since 1776, many walked the 500-mile journey, along with the Cherokee, on the infamous “Trail of Tears” to Indian Territory in what was later to become a part of the state of Oklahoma. Many died along the way.⁶

Greenwood Leflore was chief of the Choctaws. He was an educated man and tried very hard to integrate with the whites. However, he had underestimated white determination to occupy the rich lands of Mississippi. In 1830 he signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in Noxubee County about a hundred miles southeast of Avalon, which ceded the Choctaw lands to the government and was made an honorary Colonel in the U.S. Army. In the territory ceded by the Choctaws he settled in an area of what, on December 23, 1833, was to become Carroll County. He established a fifty-thousand-acre plantation close to the confluence of the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha rivers, close to where John Hurt would be born almost sixty years later. Greenwood Leflore built a luxurious and stately mansion there, which he called Malmaison. He named his plantation Teoc, a Choctaw word meaning “the place of tall pines”⁷ and he owned many slaves. A small settlement became established there and it was at Teoc where, after their release from slavery, John Hurt’s father and mother were to raise their family, and where John Hurt was to be born before the end of the century. Malmaison burned in 1942, but the Teoc church and graveyard are still there.⁸

With the onset of the Civil War, Greenwood Leflore opposed secession and remained a Unionist throughout the war. He had lost many of his Choctaw friends over their opposition to the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, and now he lost many of his white friends over the secession issue. He died on August 31, 1865.⁹

In 1880, fifteen years after the end of the Civil War, a black family of Hurts lived in Carroll County, Mississippi. The head of the family was Isom Hurt, who was aged 27 years. He was born in Alabama, as were both of his parents. Isom was married to Mary Jane Hurt (née McCain), 26, and they had three children, James, 8, Sam, 6, and Junious, 1.¹⁰ (The name Isom was also spelled Isome and Isham and the surname Hurt appears in the 1880 U.S. Census as Hert, which presumably reflects the written interpretations of the spoken names provided to census clerks.)

Mary Jane had been a slave on the McCain’s Waverley Plantation at Teoc, where she and Isom lived before moving to Avalon, a few miles north. Teoc and Avalon were situated on the dirt roads that crisscrossed the hill country on the edge of the flat Mississippi Delta. In 1880, virgin forests, swamps, and bayous occupied much of the Delta and few people lived there. It would take several decades to clear and drain the land before it could be used for cotton plantations to supply the American and increasing European demand. The people required to do this work came from the neighboring hills.¹¹

The nearest towns to Teoc were Carrollton and Greenwood to the south and Grenada to the north. At that time there was no railway joining Greenwood and Grenada through Teoc and Avalon, only dirt roads. The nearest railroad, built in 1861, connected Grenada in the north via Winona to Jackson in the south. At this time there was no railway closer to the Mississippi River.

So where in Alabama had Isom come from and under what circumstances? The 1870 U.S. Federal Census for Alabama lists a black male farm laborer named Isome Hurt who was born about 1852, aged 18, and registered in the town of North Carolina, Russell County, Alabama.¹² Isome was living with his mother, father, and siblings. The family consisted of Monroe Hurt, 53, and Patsy Hurt, 42, presumably his father and mother, and Joanna, 22, Mary A., 19, Andrew, 13, Elvira, 8, Nyley, 7, and Julia, 1. Monroe, Patsy, Joanna, and Mary A. are recorded with a birthplace in Georgia, while Isome and his younger siblings were born in Alabama. This suggests that their white owners moved the family as slaves from Georgia to Alabama in late 1851 or early 1852.

The 1860 Federal Slave Schedule lists ten white slaveholders named Hurt residing in Russell County, Alabama.¹³ At this time, 77 percent of the white population of Alabama owned 333,000 slaves, largely within the cotton counties, which did not include Russell. Poorer counties less well adapted to grow cotton had a reduced economy and fewer slaves per household.¹⁴

The slave schedules list only the age, sex, and race of slaves. When the ages and sexes of Isome Hurt, his siblings, and parents in 1860 are matched against the slaves listed for each of these ten slaveholders, one group matches very closely. This is the slaveholder John Hurt, who was also born in Georgia.¹⁵ The match is not perfect, but the ages of Patsy and all four children alive at that time exactly match the ages of Isome and his family in 1860, but there is no male aged 43 that matches the age of Monroe. A male slave aged 43 was listed as belonging to a Martha Hurt in the same locality. It was commonplace to separate slave families; perhaps this Monroe was Isome’s father.

It seems likely, though not conclusively so, that this white John Hurt was the owner of Isome and his family and that the Hurts moved, taking their slave families with them, from Georgia to Alabama around 1852. Slaveholder John Hurt was married to Santa M. Hurt, and in 1860 they had three children, Joel E., 8, Elizabeth, 5, and Leila, 11 months.¹⁶ In the 1850 census a John Hurt, possibly the same one, was living with the Mildman family in Muscogee County, Georgia, which shares its boundary with Russell County, Alabama.¹⁷

Huge numbers of white people moved into Mississippi from the east between 1830 and 1920, they and their ancestors having first settled in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia. Many, like the Hurts and McCains, settled for a time in Alabama before proceeding westward to Mississippi. Many brought their slaves with them, and after the Civil War many blacks moved westward of their own volition. In 1880, of the 470,403 whites resident in Mississippi. 353,247 (75 percent) of these were born in Mississippi while 39,567 (8 percent) were born in Alabama. 61,678 (13 percent) were born in the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, or Kentucky.

Hurt historian Ron Johnson stated that there were around 230 Hurts recorded in Mississippi from 1850 to 1930. These were mostly descended from families who had settled first in Virginia and moved rather rapidly from there through the Carolinas and Georgia before heading westward. Mississippi and Louisiana were for some reason not popular destinations of the Hurt families and many of them leap-frogged those states into Texas. During slavery, slaves were not provided with family names, but following emancipation, many freed slaves adopted the family names of their previous owners. This practice was more common in Mississippi and Alabama than elsewhere.¹⁸

So it seems that Monroe Hurt was Isom Hurt’s father and Mississippi John Hurt’s grandfather. Monroe, born about 1817, and son Isom were born into slavery. At the end of the Civil War, Monroe was 48 years old and Isom 13. Isom left the family home between 1870 and 1880, by which time he had moved to Carroll County Mississippi, married Mary Jane McCain on July 29, 1876,¹⁹ and had three children, James, Sam, and Junious. Isom also had become a trustee of the local Mitchell Springs School in Teoc.²⁰

As for Mary Jane’s story, slaveholder William Alexander McCain lived in Carroll County, Mississippi, in 1860. His estate was valued at $50,000 and his personal assets at $50,000. He was married with seven children and owned fifty-two slaves. One of his slaves was a seven-year-old girl (Mary Jane would have been seven years old at this time).²¹ Ten years later in 1870 after the end of the Civil War, when she was 17, a Mary McCain is listed living with her two-year-old daughter, Ann, in Carroll County, Mississippi. She worked for D. M. Gordner, a white farmer who, in addition to his wife and two children, housed twenty-two black and white servants and farm laborers.²²

In the 1860 U.S. Federal Census, William McCain’s eldest child was listed as aged 17 years and born in Alabama. The McCains’ next child was aged 13 and born in Mississippi. This suggests that the McCain family, along with its slaves, moved from Alabama to Mississippi between 1843 and 1847.²³

In 1850 the family resided in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. William A. McCain, then 36, who was born in North Carolina, had married Louisa (recorded simply with an initial L in the 1860 census), 26, and was father to son Joseph (J in the 1860 Census), 7, and daughters Mary E. (M. E. in the 1860 Census), 3, and Ann Eliza, 2. Joseph was born in Alabama, while Mary E. and Ann Eliza were born in Mississippi.²⁴ This supports the view that the family moved from Alabama to Mississippi between 1843 and 1847, but clearly they resided in Tallahatchie County before moving to Teoc in Carroll County. There they bought the 2000-acre Waverley plantation and became neighbors of Greenwood Leflore, the Choctaw chief who had signed away Choctaw lands to the whites in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. In the 1880 U.S. Federal Census, Mary McCain’s parents are recorded as being born in Alabama. Interestingly, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, is a descendent of slaveholder William Alexander McCain (his great-great grandfather), who owned Mary Jane McCain, Mississippi John Hurt’s mother.²⁵

After the war, when slaves were liberated, it was possible to “apprentice” or take into care orphaned slaves who were under the age of eighteen. N. H. McCain, a joint owner of the Waverley Plantation along with his brother William Alexander McCain, made an application to apprentice two orphaned former slave girls, Mary Jane, 15, and Julia, 10. The petition states that he was the “...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Early Years: From Slavery to Freedom
• Chapter 2. The Middle Years, 1929–1962: Return to Avalon and the Depression
• Chapter 3. Rediscovery and Sweet Success
• Chapter 4. Management Problems and the Death of Mississippi John Hurt
• Chapter 5. The Legacies of Mississippi John Hurt
• Appendix I. Interviews, Correspondence, and Personal Communications
• Appendix II. Contract between Music Research Incorporated and Mississippi John Hurt, 1963
• Appendix III. Vanguard Contract, July 11, 1963
• Appendix IV. Mississippi John Hurt Discography
• Notes
• Index