Did You Hear John Hurt-With Mississippi John Hurt In Mind

 

By Bradley Fox 

“Are you going over to Harvard Square Friday night to hear that guy, John Hurt, everybody has been talking about at the Club Nana, the old guy that Mick Greenleaf discovered when he went on that trip down South to see if any of the old time blues singers were still around, or if anybody knew what had happened to them?,” Cecilia Taylor had inquired of Theresa Green, her college roommate at Boston University and more importantly to this conversation fellow folk aficionado. Folk aficionado on Theresa’s part ever since the previous fall when in the toss-up for roommates at the freshman dormitories on Bay State Road had produced Cecelia as her mate. Cecelia from Fort Lee on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge had been a regular coffeehouse going on the weekends in the Village since her junior year of high school and she had kind of dragged Theresa in her wake. Theresa from Podunk Riverdale about forty miles south of Boston had never even heard of folk music, could not name one song off-hand and was furthermore clueless about blues, country blues of which Mississippi John Hurt was a representative as Cecelia called it a sub-set of folk.(Theresa if she had thought about that question of not knowing a folk song off-hand only had to think back to seven grade Music Appreciation class with Miss Enos and her attempts to get her charges to sing some song such as Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land to know that she knew at least that one national anthem of folk although in high school she had been so mired in teenage heartthrobs like Bobby Darin, Fabian, and Bobby Vee that any other thoughts about music were so much wind.)            

That Theresa “dragged along” by the way, aside from the question of whether she was, or was not going to the Club Nana Friday night, was made infinitely easier by Cecilia having thrown Mel Jackson out as a lure. Mel was well-known in the freshman class, by the girls at least, as one of the sexiest guys around. Moreover he had been learning to play the guitar and to sing some of the folk songs that were making the rounds in the clubs and coffeehouses at the Tuesday night “open mics” held at the Cafe Blanc on the other side of the street from the Club Nana on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge. Cecelia had known Mel since day one of school since he had been in her freshman orientation class and on the round-robin question and answer period they had both mentioned an interest in the budding folk music movement running its course through a lot of college towns and other urban oases. They had subsequently had a couple of dates but the flame wasn’t there and so they became just friends.

That “just friends” status though had gotten Cecelia to meet Mel’s roommate Thorn Davis who did strike a flame. So one Friday night Cecelia who had been talking up her interest in the folk scene since they had become roommates talked Theresa, dateless and bored, into going on a double date with her and Thorn, Mel the bait. That night Tom Paxton, a new talent, a guy who was either in the Army or who had just gotten out down at Fort Dix in New Jersey was playing at Jerry’s Coffeehouse and so they spent the evening listening to his stuff (Jerry’s a notch below the Café Blanc and Club Nana which charged a cover and required that you at least had a cup of coffee in front of you to keep your seat so that the featured performer actually got paid from the admission fee did not charge admission. Jerry’s did as all such establishment did in Harvard Square at least require the cup of coffee and got the crowd that could not get into the formerly mentioned clubs or guys out on cheap dates with girls that they didn’t figure to get anywhere with. A whole treatise could be written on “getting anywhere with and dating etiquette back then, now to for that matter. Performers hated the set-up because they had to play for the “basket,” had to pass the hat in the audience to make their nightly wages to keep the landlord from their doors.)         

Although that night had been something of a disaster for the Mel-Theresa combination since Mel was serious about attempting to make a career out of folk music, that was his idea anyway and Theresa only knew as much about folk music as Cecelia had told her in quick flashes so she would not be totally adrift. Every time the conversation hit a  turn she would be clueless, for example, when they talked about Pete Seeger and his earlier career with the Weavers and they mentioned how the Weavers had made a big hit out of Leadbelly’s Goodnight, Irene she knew neither the Weavers nor the name Leadbelly ( except to think that it was an odd name for a singer or a person ). So that night Mel and Theresa had kind of flopped, except she did like Tom Paxton, especially his Last Thing On My Mind. That seemed to be about it, one date and done.

The next morning early Theresa woke Cecelia up and told her she needed a crash course in advanced folk (that is how she put the matter) since she had not slept a wink thinking about Mel’s blue eyes, bedroom eyes she called them and Cecelia knew exactly why she wanted that crash course. Cecelia passed Theresa her copy of Fred Allen’s A Layman’s Folk Music History  and told her to start reading from page one and then she could ask questions. Theresa thereafter learned about the roots of the roots of folk from the old country British mist of time ballads that were collected by Francis Child in the 19^th century which in bastardized versions were still played in places like Appalachia and Nova Scotia. The French-Canadian Arcadian traditions that would head south to the swamps of Louisiana and Cajun music. The key role of Delta and Piedmont blues in the black musical experience all the way up to those Newport “discoveries.” More importantly for the benefit of her Mel dreams to know who the hell Peter Seeger, the Weavers, Dave Von Ronk, Josh White and the rest of the current or near current batch of folk tradition aficionados.       

Over time Theresa, granted with a great deal of help from Cecelia who after all had lived through that first crucial period of the folk revival, did become very knowledgeable about the folk scene and some folk history too although she had not seen Mel during that time she was getting tutored in the high points by Cecelia but she was determined if she did see him that she would do better than that first date. One afternoon toward the spring of 1963 she was walking along Commonwealth Avenue up by the Sherman Union and heard a guy singing a song, Come All You Fair And Tender Maidens and step closer to hear who was singing the song. Of course it was Mel. When he saw her he waved and smiled, a little. With that little encouragement after he had finished the song she went up to him and said all in one breathe, “I didn’t know that you were into mountain music, isn’t that a song that Dave Von Ronk covered on his Inside Dave Van Ronk album and didn’t that song get discovered by Cecil Sharpe, the British folklorist back in the early part of the century down in Kentucky.” Bingo. Mel asked if she was doing anything Friday night since Hedy West was playing at the Café Mark in Kenmore Square. And that was that.

So Cecelia asking Theresa if she was going to hear John Hurt was not an academic question. The answer though was “no” since she and Mel were going to the Village Friday afternoon in order to hear Dave Van Ronk at the Gaslight. She did ask Cecelia to tell her what Hurt’s playlist was and any impressions she had of him when she got back Sunday night.                                  

Sunday night came and Theresa was back. After putting her luggage away Theresa asked Cecelia how the Hurt concert had gone. Cecelia laughed, said the show was great. What she was laughing about was how she had been expecting some big old black guy, maybe the size of Howlin’ Wolf or something and then on stage came kind of haltingly this little wizened old man in an old rumbled suit and a straw hat that must have been older than him. He was so short that Mike Greenleaf had to keep adjusting the mic every couple of songs when he would change positions. He had this ratty old guitar too that he said he had bought for about six dollars in the Sear & Roebuck catalogue back in the 1920s. Then he told the story about how Mike and a couple of other guys had come down to Clarksville down in Mississippi looking for him after somebody in Jackson had told them about an old blues player in the Clarksville area named Hurt. Mike and the others had known exactly who their informants meant since they had all listened to him on one of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music albums.

The way Hurt told the story here he was in this little shack of a house, a cabin I guess and had been picking cotton ever since he could remember after that minute of fame. Somebody from the audience then asked him, since some rumors were going around that Sid Dalton, his manager was working him too hard, taking too much dough for himself and not getting the best deals for his projected albums. Hurt had a funny answer, he said whatever arrangements Sid made were fine by him since playing “beats picking cotton for an old man” and he smiled his couple of teeth missing smile. He sang like heaven (played some very clean guitar picking which Thorn and Cecelia had never seen before). Sang Creole Belle, Frankie and Albert, his version of the traditional Frankie and Johnny song, Candy Man, Miss Collins Moans, Beulah Land, Coffee Spoon, and a few others they didn’t know but sounded good. “Too bad you guys couldn’t come,” Cecelia said. Theresa said wistfully that she wished they had too since Dave Van Ronk had been drinking heavily before his show and it showed-he had a very off night. And so it goes.