Folk Singers: Little John

It doesn’t sound quite like the blues. The thumb strums a steady one-two beat on the two lowest guitar strings while two fingers play arpeggio melodies on the upper strings. There are no leaning, sliding blue notes, no full chords. The music is light and nimble, and the guitar accompanies the singer’s baritone voice in note-for-note unison:

No more potatoes,

Frost done killed the vine

The blues ain’t nothin’

But a good woman on your mind.

The song is C. C. Rider, and the verse expresses the bitterest feelings of its author and singer, a sweet-tempered old man named Mississippi John Hurt.

Six months ago, Hurt was home in a farm Avalon, for Miss. $28 a (pop. 200), month — while working his on wife cooked free for the farmer.

Last week he was in Washington holding nightly seminars in country blues at a coffeehouse called The Ontario Place, and he was getting paid $200 a week. The crowd, as usual, sipped its espresso in silence: the shy singer—69 years old and only 5 ft. 4 in. tall—is the important rediscovered folk singer to come out of Mississippi’s delta country, the traditional home of country blues singers.and overcast in Birmingham.

Hurt is now the grandfather of 17, but much of his music is a souvenir of his earliest childhood. Having quit school at eight, he learned such songs as Good Morning, Miss Carrie, Salty Dog and Spanish Fandang on the unpainted porch of his family’s sharecropper shack. As he developed his unique guitar style, he invented others — Spike Driver Blues, Candy Man Blues, Cow Hooking Blues. Eager scouts for Okeh Records showed up in 1928 to record Hurt, then left him to tend to his chores for 35 years. Last March a musicologist searched him out once more and talked him into resuming his career. “I thought he was the police,” Hurt remembers. “When he asked me to come up North, I figured if I told him no, he’d take me anyway, so I told him yes.”

Hurt came north to sing at the Philadelphia and Newport folk festivals, then went back home to pick cotton for $4 a day. Now he has signed up for concerts this winter in Boston and New York, and settled down to his first regular singing job. Sitting on a black kitchen chair with his old brown fedora crunched down over his eyes, he sings until the sweat runs down his guitar, quietly announcing each song and saying nothing more— except to ask his listeners if he should leave out the slyly spicy lyrics in some of his songs. He is always told no, and then he sings:

The rooster said, “Cock-a-doodle-doo.”

Richland woman said, “Any do will do.”