Mississippi John Hurt's Home goes Country

Okay, it already WAS country. But the blues legend's tiny shotgun house with a tin roof is now a museum, and it sits further out in the country than ever before.

According to an article by Steve Cheseborough in Acoustic Guitar magazine, the middle of Avalon, Mississippi, was no longer a suitable spot to honor the man who used to play guitar on the front porch. The restored house was moved to a wooded ridge on the edge of the Mississippi Delta region in order to save it from demolition.

The quiet new setting is effective. According to Cheseborough, merely standing on the porch and listening to curator Art Browning picking some of Hurt's old tunes ("Payday" and "Louis Collins," for example) was enough to summon the "gentle power of the master."

Hurt started playing guitar in 1902, at the age of 9, on a $1.50 second-hand guitar that his mother bought for him (to stop him from sneaking into the room of a boarder and playing his guitar). By 14 he was performing for parties. At 35 he was given a chance to record for Okeh Records in Memphis and New York. Failing to find commercial success, he returned to Avalon to farm, do railroad work, and play on his front porch.

The house that now stands as his museum was his home from the mid-1940's until 1963. At that time he was coaxed into moving to Washington, DC, by a pair of music fans who had heard his (now rare) Okeh recording of "Avalon Blues" and tracked him to the real Avalon. The burgeoning folk scene of the early 1960's embraced Hurt warmly, and he began touring and recording actively.

His old house fell into disrepair, saved by Hurt's granddaughter Mary Frances Hurt Wright, a suburban Chicago schoolteacher. The surrounding land had been subdivided, changed beyond recognition. But the old house itself brought back childhood memories of Avalon and her late grandfather. (Hurt died in 1966 and is buried in Avalon.)

With some local help, she had the house moved and restored. The museum was dedicated in July 2002. Although some original furniture and other items remained in the boarded up house, the museum still seeks artifacts related to Hurt's music -- his guitars and his trademark fedora hats.

Wright wants to develop the museum into a local cultural center for children. (And she, who never had planned to return to the Delta, is settling down in Avalon.)

Read the article in Acoustic Guitar magazine [June 2003 not yet posted online; they usually wait a few months after print publication]

Read a short bio of Hurt at Mudcat.org, w/pictures of the house and Hurt himself, or at Dead Blues Guys.com

Visit the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi

Check out the World’s Rarest Records, and their listing of Hurt's 78s

Read what his label, Vanguard Records, has to say