American blues and folk guitarist and singer whose 1928 Okeh recordings — eight sides cut in Memphis and New York including "Avalon Blues," "Frankie," "Stack O'Lee Blues," "Spike Driver Blues," and "Candy Man Blues" — and whose 1963 rediscovery and brief career on the folk-revival concert circuit, restored him to a national audience after thirty-five years of farm work in Avalon, Mississippi, place him among the most distinctive and most loved figures in American vernacular music. Hurt was born in 1893 in Teoc, Carroll County, Mississippi, and lived almost his entire life in the immediate neighborhood — Avalon, the small unincorporated settlement he named in his 1928 song and through which he was rediscovered when the musicologist Tom Hoskins, working backwards from the lyric "Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind," drove there in 1963 and found him.
The 1928 sides did not sell. Okeh dropped him; the Depression closed the recording field for race-records artists; Hurt returned to sharecropping and, later, livestock work, playing music for neighbors on his porch but not on records or stages, for thirty-five years. The rediscovery brought him to the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and 1964, to the Library of Congress for re-recording sessions, to the coffeehouses of Cambridge and the Village, and to a generation of young white folk-revival musicians — Dave Van Ronk, Jorma Kaukonen, John Sebastian, Stefan Grossman, Bob Dylan — for whom Hurt's quiet, three-finger fingerpicking, melodic and metrically supple in a way that was unlike the heavier Delta blues of Charley Patton or Son House, became a foundational technique. He died in 1966 in Grenada, Mississippi, less than three years after his rediscovery, having recorded enough in that brief window for three Vanguard albums that constitute the bulk of the work most listeners now know.
The contrast with the harder Delta tradition is part of what makes Hurt's music distinctive. The fingerpicking is melodic rather than percussive, the voice is gentle rather than declamatory, the songs draw on the older minstrel and ragtime and ballad repertoires (Frankie and Johnny, Stagolee, John Henry) as much as on twelve-bar blues, and the persona on record is that of the courteous, soft-spoken, deeply musical neighbor that everyone who met him in 1963 described. The folk revival's relationship to Black Southern music has been, deservedly, the subject of a critical literature — the white-mediated rediscovery, the financial arrangements, the framing of the rediscovered musicians as figures from a vanished past — but the recordings themselves, and the testimony of people who knew him, suggest that Hurt's last three years were among the happiest of his life.