A shotgun house made of cypress wood sits in a field. It’s dark outside, the sound of the tall weeds hitting the side of the house cutting the silence.
Mary Hurt’s eyes pop open, glancing to her side table to check the time. It’s early morning in October 1996, but the sun isn’t up yet. This is the fourth time this week she’s dreamt of her grandfather’s house in Avalon, Miss.
“But why do I keep dreaming about it?” She mumbles the question quietly so as to not disturb her sleeping husband. The constant dreams were becoming disturbing and unsettling, robbing her of sleep and sanity. Having had enough, Hurt gets up one Saturday morning with a mission in mind: to visit that Carroll County home.
“I’m gonna take a train to Mississippi,” she tells her husband as she packs a bag for her trip back home. It would take her about a day to get there from Chicago, but she was fine with that timetable. Thanks to a friend from her home state, Hurt would have a vehicle waiting for her once she pulled into the train station. Arriving in Avalon, she retrieves her truck, places her bags in the backseat and drives to her grandfather’s house.
As she turns into the driveway toward the site, the building looks the same as it did in her dreams. Parking, she grabs a camera she brought with her and exits the vehicle, taking pictures of what had become a recurring nightmare. While she was clicking away on her camera, she could hear a car driving up in the distance.
She pays it no mind as many people visited the property looking for the gravesite of her grandfather, blues singer Mississippi John Hurt. Whoever it is, their footsteps crunch the grass as they approach, breaking up the silence as they continue to get closer. Hurt remains facing forward, brewing in her mounting frustration.
She still hadn’t figured it out. Why was this house haunting her?
“God, I wish I knew who owned this land,” she says aloud.
“Why do you want to know that?” the mystery male voice asks.
She could feel their presence right at her back, but his interjection is unwanted, spiking her anger and frustration further.
“I was talking to myself,” she responds.
“No, really. Why do you want to know that? What would you do with the house if you knew who owned the land?” he presses.
Quiet returns to the scene as Mary rolled over the question in her head. Looking at the house, she thinks back to her grandfather and all that he was. Still facing ahead, she blurts out the first thing that comes to mind.
“I would make it a museum.”
“Then, it’s yours,” he answers.
Shocked by how fast and easy the negotiation process seemed to take place, Mary Hurt finally turns around to face a middle-aged white man named Dave Murphy.
“Do you know me?” she asks him.
“No.”
“Do you know my grandfather?”
“No,” he answers. “God told me you were going to be here today and that this house belonged to the family.”
Murphy owned the land on her grandfather’s property and the surrounding area, selling all of it except for the land her grandfather’s house rested on. Something was holding him back, and that something or someone, he believed, was Mary Hurt.
“How much do you want for it?” she asks him, bracing for a steep asking price.
“$5,000,” Murphy answers.
‘The Panacea That Heals the Soul’
John Smith Hurt was born July 3, 1893 in Teoc, Miss. He gravitated toward the guitar at an early age, seeing the guitar on Pete Seeger’s “Rainbow Quest” folk music television program. Local guitarist William Henry Carson was a frequent guest at John’s home. When Carson would fall asleep, 9-year-old John Hurt would sneak into his room and attempt to play some of Carson’s songs. The first song he learned was Carson’s “Hip Joint.”
Eventually, Hurt grew skilled enough that his mother scraped together $1.15 and bought him his first guitar, a black guitar he called “Black Annie.” As a young man, he worked as a farmhand and railroad worker while playing music at local gatherings including country dances and fish fries. Though he performed as a hobbyist, he spent many hours perfecting his three-finger playing technique.
Hurt also started a family, courting Gertrude Hoskin and marrying her in 1916. Though the marriage was brief, they had a son named T.C., the father of Mary Frances Hurt, who is the current administrator of the Mississippi John Hurt Foundation. After the couple’s split, he took a common-law wife, Jessie Wade, and they had a son, John William. The couple stayed together until his passing in 1966.
Sometimes, Hurt would play backup guitar for a white fiddler named Willie Narmour, who recommended him to Okeh talent scouts in 1928. Narmour praised Hurt’s gentle singing voice, his thumb-picked guitar and alternating bass techniques, and his original songs like murder ballad “Louis Collins.” Hurt auditioned for Okeh in his home, impressing them enough to record his song “Monday Morning Blues.”
Okeh took Hurt to Memphis and then New York to record 12 released sides including “Spike Driver’s Blues” and “Candy Man.” The sides sold moderately well, but their greater success was limited at the time due to the Great Depression and Okeh’s refusal to market his music outside of the traditional “race record” categorization.
John Hurt returned to Avalon to await more work from Okeh, but they never reached out again, and he resigned himself to a life in Avalon. In 1935, Hurt appeared on the Works Progress Administration payroll, allowing him to continue working in Avalon. He briefly held a position at a factory in Jackson, Miss., but quit and went on to work for A.R. Perkins, an Avalon landowner who employed John and Jessie. At one point during this time, he didn’t own a guitar and played on borrowed instruments.
In 1963, his redemption came when Tom Hoskins, a fan, came to Avalon with a tape recorder, his Gibson J-45 and a hunch that “Avalon Blues” held the clues necessary to find John Hurt. Due to the work of Hoskins and others, John moved to Washington, D.C., and found himself at the center of a burgeoning folk-music movement that had taken over colleges and coffee houses across the nation.
His singing voice and complex guitar picking set him apart from some of his harsher sounding Delta blues peers. Many who were lucky enough to see him live talked about his glowing inner spirit that transcended being a good musician. Though time had taken its toll on many other bluesmen like Skip James and Sleepy John Estes, Hurt had retained his playing style, a kind smile and a twinkle in his eye that won him legions of fans.
John Hurt moved back to Mississippi after his oldest son, T.C., passed away. Shortly after burying his son, John Hurt died on Nov. 2, 1966. Through his music, fans of all ages are exposed to the rich oral, musical and literary traditions of the Mississippi Delta and surrounding areas, marking Mississippi John Hurt as an ideal ambassador for early African American music and culture.
“He was a quiet storm. He was very sagacious, very humble. And I think he didn’t really realize how talented he was. He didn’t realize his talent,” Mary Frances Hurt, his granddaughter, told the Mississippi Free Press during a phone interview.
To everyone else, he was Mississippi John Hurt, but Mary and her siblings referred to him as Daddy John. Growing up, she remembers watching him play his guitar for the community, a smile on his face all the time. His smile intrigued her because she viewed Mississippi as a horrible place in many ways and didn’t understand why he smiled so often.
“I believe through his music he found a peace that supersedes any of the animosities and the hatred and hardship of life that he saw,” Mary said. “He found a peace and understanding of music and a great appreciation for it. It is the panacea that heals the soul.”
As an adult, Mary Hurt became a writing teacher in inner-city Chicago. The House of Blues designed a program for Chicago Public School students to have artists come in and teach them about blues music. While the students learned, Mary and the other instructors began to explore the music venue. On her way to the gift shop, she saw John’s silhouette.
“I could always recognize my grandfather’s image,” she explained.
As she read his biography, she realized the information had inaccuracies. When she brought the errors to the attention of one of the workers, she told Mary that they couldn’t do anything about it.
“I reflected back on what one of my favorite writers, Toni Morrison, would say. She said if there’s a book that you want to read and it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,” Mary Frances Hurt said. “And that began my journey to correct any- and everything that I saw that was about my grandfather.”
The former teacher started by editing websites like Wikipedia and worked from there. A few years later, she started being plagued with dreams of her grandfather’s shotgun house in Avalon, which led to her receiving Dave Murphy’s offer to purchase the property. In 1997, she founded the Mississippi John Hurt Foundation with a mission to help preserve the legacy of her grandfather.
The foundation maintained John Hurt’s home, which was converted into the Mississippi John Hurt Museum. The foundation also managed the St. James Church, the singer’s place of worship and his school, as well as Hurt’s grave in the St. James Cemetery.
The Miraculous $5,000
Shortly after meeting Dave Murphy, Mary Hurt hops into her truck and heads to People Bank, the only bank in Carrollton, Miss. Her great-grandfather had obtained a loan through this bank, and so did her grandfather, John Hurt. Mary enters the bank and asks the clerk Martha if she could talk to the bank president Pate Shackleford. He happened to be passing by when she arrived, so she immediately is allowed into his office.
“What did you want to talk to me about?” Shackleford asks her, reclining in his big office chair with his hands folded behind his head.
“All I need is $5,000. There’s this place that is filled with hay, moss and maybe some snakes, but I need you to help me do what my grandfather did—that your grandparents did for my grandparents. I need to buy back a piece of myself,” she explains.
“Where’s this place?”
“It’s on a little road called Tiago–”
“You mean the old Hurt house?”
“Yes sir.”
“I knew John. He used to play for my mama,” he reminisced. “How much do you need?”
“$5,000.”
“You got it. You come back here tomorrow, and I’ll have your check ready.”
Mary stands up to leave, grateful that the process to acquire a loan was quick and easy. She returns to the bank the next day. As promised, the president presents her with a $5,000 check. Dave Murphy owned a store in town, so she heads in that direction to deliver the check and bring herself a step closer to her ancestral land.
Murphy sees her pull up and meets her at the door; unfortunately, he has bad news.
“I’m sorry. I can’t sell the house because the people who bought the land in front of the house said they would burn it down if you fix it there,” he tells her. “But I tell you what? If you can move it, I’ll give it to you.”
Mary is crushed, her joy evaporating in seconds. Now, she had another problem on her hands. Dejected, she reenters her car and drives to her mother’s home to process and figure out her next steps. As she walks through the home, the phone rings. With her mother preoccupied in the bathroom, she answers the phone out of instinct.
Her mother’s friend, Lula House, is on the line, calling to speak to her friend for their daily phone call. Somehow, their conversation turns to Hurt’s current predicament. Call it fate or luck, but House just so happens to have a solution for her problem.
“You know what? I know somebody who moved houses,” House says.
“Ma’am, this isn’t a mobile home. This is an old house, over a hundred years old.”
“I know, but they’ve done this before. I’ll call you back.”
About 15 minutes later, the phone rings again, and House gives Hurt the number to a company in Kosciuszko, Miss. She calls them, relaying her situation and giving them a rough estimate of the dimensions of the house.
“We can move it,” the man says. “But it’s going to cost you a whole lot of money.”
Mary’s heart drops. This is what she had been dreading. Bracing herself, she asks, “How much?”
“It’ll be $5,000,” he says.
A laugh bubbles up from her throat, much to the chagrin of the person on the phone. Hurt’s laughter irritates him, and he chastises her for wasting his time before she explains the circumstances behind her unexpected response. God sure is funny, she thinks. The $5,000 she initially needed to buy the land could now precisely cover the expenses of moving her maternal grandparents’ home up the road to a less problematic location, which the company did in 1997.
“I tell you, God knows from the moment I moved that house there, it’s been like a miracle ever since,” Hurt told the Mississippi Free Press.
‘An Air About It’
Hay, hay and more hay greets Mary Frances Hurt once she opens the door to her grandfather’s shotgun house. She could barely make out the space until she clears the interior. All of the home’s furniture is arranged just as her grandfather had left it. Canned jars on the shelf. The table set like he would be walking through that door any minute for dinner. The house was filled with him, she described.
“It was like somebody just went away and was expecting to come back,” Hurt said.
She kept the layout of the home intact, letting visitors experience a behind-the-scenes segment of John Hurt’s life. When Mary entered the home, she felt her grandfather’s presence and a sense of peace.
“Everybody who came there, they would say the same thing. It was an air about it that was unmistakable,” the musician’s granddaughter said. “On one side of the wall, there were hundreds of people who had signed it and the country they came from. It was special.”
Mississippi John Hurt Museum curator Floyd Bailey said most visitors at the museum came from out of town. A Virginia teacher brought his students to the museum every year. A group of young people visited the museum for a school project where they recounted the history of John Hurt through old televisions, radios and a memory card. Families on vacation stopped by to visit, bringing their young kids along as well.
“I’ve had people come there, (and) I show them the museum and take them to the gravesite. They come back, sit there and play his music all night long,” Bailey told the Mississippi Free Press. “A lot of them like to take pictures in front of the museum.”
The Montgomery County native met Mary Frances Hurt while on a photography job for Hurt’s family reunion. She had just moved the house to its new property and needed some repairs. Having no luck elsewhere, it just so happened that Bailey had experience in that department as a rental property owner. He worked on the shotgun house off and on for about a year.
“She told me she wanted it just like it was. (She) didn’t want to make too many changes with no indoor plumbing and all the lights hanging from the ceiling. You pull with a chain to get them on,” he recalled.
Bailey took over as the curator of the museum after the original curator, Art Browning, passed away. His role mainly involves looking after the property when Mary is out of town, giving visitors a tour of the museum and gravesite, and answering any questions they have.
Ironically enough, when Bailey first began working for Mary Frances Hurt, he didn’t know much about John Hurt or his music. The blues musician was still alive when Bailey moved to the area in 1963, but he didn’t learn about Hurt’s unique talents until he went to the library and did some research.
“I listened to his music. (I learned) he taught himself to play, and I remember reading that his mama bought his first guitar, and she paid $1.15 for it,” Bailey said. “When he went to New York, they had a crowd up there. People just couldn’t believe Mississippi John Hurt could draw such a crowd.”
‘A Death Unlike Any’
It was the early morning of Feb. 21, 2024, when Annie Ledger, Mary’s sister, calls Floyd Bailey with terrible news. She lived next door to the museum and outside her window, she could see the museum engulfed in flames.
“Come up here; that museum is burning down,” she urges Floyd.
No fire departments were within the vicinity of where they lived, so help wouldn’t be coming soon. Bailey swiftly changes into day clothes and rushes to the property, only to see the shotgun house made out of cypress wood slowly turning into ash.
“Everything was burnt like it was put in an incinerator or something.” he described.
Bailey was in disbelief—and still is to this day—as to how the fire could have started. When he goes to show people the museum, he makes sure to turn the breakers off once he leaves, so he feels certain that nothing in the building itself should have been able to start the fire.
The museum burned down a day after it received recognition as a national landmark. Law enforcement from the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office told Mary that they did not suspect foul play, but Hurt remains apprehensive. Prior incidents like the desecration of her grandfather’s gravesite show a pattern of harassment aimed at intimidating the Hurt family, she believes.
Mary describes the loss of the museum as “a death unlike any that I’ve ever felt.” It took her months before she finally went to see the site, where she was met with the ashes of what once was a source of cherished memories.
“When I went there, I could visually see the smoke coming from the remains there, and there was no fire. I vowed I would never cover that site. I would never remove the debris from that site. I do believe my grandfather’s soul is still there,” she said.
Some of the last images captured of the museum are depicted in a film Mary has been developing for the past three years about her grandfather titled, “A Man Called Hurt: The Life and Music of Mississippi John Hurt.” The film, telling the story of John Hurt through the eyes of the people who personally knew him, recently won first place at the Nashville Film Festival.
“About three years ago, God put it on my heart to just really pursue it fervently,” Mary Frances Hurt said. “I’ve co-written books with people that they’ve taken credit for holistically. I decided that I was not going to ‘co’ anything with anybody that was coming straight from me. I was blessed enough to find a new film company out of Knoxville, Tennessee, and I explained the concept to them.”
Last November, while filming in New York, she had this feeling that they needed to return to Mississippi and film the museum to make it the last part of the documentary. The filmmakers were reluctant to return, but they eventually made the trip in October 2023.
“When we were finishing up the documentary, I was insistent on them coming back and filming the museum and doing the memorial walk to the cemetery,” Hurt said. “And I’m so very grateful that we have those images on tape.”
The film will be shown at the annual Mississippi John Hurt Homecoming Festival and History Symposium on Oct. 5 and Oct. 6, 2024, in Carrollton, Miss. Throughout the weekend, the festival will feature musical performances, a memorial walk, a museum ashes memorial, a film screening, a descendants roundtable, a blues trail marker installation and workshops. Admission is free, but the foundation is accepting donations.
“It might be sad with the museum burnt down, but when things happen like that, you have to go on and hope something better happens,” Bailey said. “People ask me all the time about the museum. What happened? Are y’all gonna be back?”
Despite the fire earlier this year, Mary had no plans to cancel the festival. In fact, the incident only motivated her to continue her work. Her future plans include rebuilding the museum, but this time as the Mississippi John Hurt Fine Arts Center.
“The future and all the things that we want to see done in our lives, you have to be the catalyst for that,” Mary said. “You have to be not only the voice, but the making of what you want to see.”
2025 Award: AAN Publishers
1st Place, Music Writing
The Mississippi John Hurt Homecoming Festival and History Symposium will take place on Oct. 5 and Oct. 6 at 1973 County Road 109 in Carrollton, Miss. To help support the free event, donate to the foundation via PayPal. To learn more about the Mississippi John Hurt Foundation, visit msjohnhurtfoundation.org.