Down on the Bayou

"Hey,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Happy Fourth of July!”
“You too. What’s up?”
“Want to go on a road trip?”
“Sure.”

In case you’ve been incarcerated for the past few months or just don’t read very carefully, I love going on road trips—and especially on the Fourth, when burning some fuel and traveling the country is what makes America great. I needed to ask one question though: “Where to?”
“This blues festival in Northern Mississippi.”

I’m well aware that every other post is about my adventures to some small-town blues festival and that I’m thoroughly addicted. Anyway, I needed my fix and I was ready to go within two shakes of a lamb’s tail.
“Let’s go!”

And we went…to Avalon, Mississippi for the annual Mississippi John Hurt Blues Festival. There was only one problem: we had no clue who Mississippi John Hurt even was, except for the fact that he adopted his home state as his prenom de guerre in an ever-competitive blues world. Thankfully, most of the friendly folks we talked to upon our arrival in Avalon tolerated our egregious ignorance and educated us on the man who some say to be the one of the most influential blues guitarists.

A Scottish Jew we met at the festival is writing a book on Hurt and emphasized that what’s especially interesting about Mississippi John Hurt is not his achievements, but the path he took to his achievements. Growing up on a farm in Avalon, he became a popular singer in the community and in the late 1920s recorded several albums in Memphis and New York. His record label, however, went belly-up during the Depression and he returned to Avalon to tend to the land once again. Thirty years later, a folk musicologist became enamored with Hurt’s music and came to Avalon to both find him and convince him to come out east to perform—at the age of seventy years old. Hurt agreed and made his debut performance at the famed Newport Folk Festival in 1963, a festival that also boasted Bob Dylan, Peter Paul & Mary, and Joan Baez on its lineup. Many believed that Hurt would fail to connect to his audience due to profound geographical and generational differences, yet that proved not to be the case. He came out on stage, slowly scanned the crowd, and asked with confidence, “In Mississippi fashion, how’s it going y’all?” Everyone went berserk and his set was an absolute success. After that show and up until his death three years later, he made several recordings and became an integral part of the 1960s “folk revival.” So, in a way, I suppose Hurt is the Terrence Mann (from Field of Dreams) of Blues Music…except without apparitions and a Moonlight Graham.

I spent Thursday and Friday in Lafayette, Louisiana and New Iberia, Louisiana doing research on their small yet vibrant Jewish communities. These two towns make up a large part of what is known as Acadiana, the area to which French Acadians fled and settled when leaving English-colonized Quebec. In other words, this was Cajun country! We heard some great Zydeco, the musical genre at the intersection of traditional Cajun music and Delta blues, at a small tin-roofed venue and the next morning I ate a hearty Cajun breakfast of an omelet, biscuits, and grits. Mmm… What was most striking about this area was the landscape. Somewhere between the palatial swamps, moss-and-ivy covered oak trees, and the 500% humidity, I realized that The Waterboy wasn’t very far off: