Legendary Avalon blues musician Mississippi John Hurt experienced rebirth during his lifetime. Now his granddaughter, Mary Hurt Wright, wants to extend his life again, into the place where he lived, bringing women at risk and youth in need to a rural setting in Carroll County to renew themselves in a safe, peaceful setting.
A remote and supremely talented, self-taught musician, John Hurt was recorded in the late 1920s by Okeh Records and then lived in obscurity in the hills north of Greenwood for the next 35 years.
In 1963, a music producer found him, still in Avalon, and reintroduced him to a new generation of blues lovers and guitar pickers. He played the Newport Folk Festival, gained a legion of devoted fans nationally and internationally and experienced a second recording career before dying in Grenada in 1966.
More than 50 years after his death, Hurt’s fame still extends around the world. At last year’s homecoming festival at Avalon, visitors from Belgium and the Netherlands joined a small crowd of local people to play and listen to his music.
In years past, the legacy of Hurt was celebrated each year on a stretch of green meadow surrounded by deep woods just north of Greenwood in the Avalon community. The annual Labor Day folk and blues festival honoring Hurt’s musical legacy went silent for a few years but was revived last year by the foundation, Wright, the Carroll County Board of Supervisors, volunteers and music aficionados.
Now, extending the work of the Mississippi John Hurt Foundation beyond the festival to include critical needs of Greenwood, Leflore County and Carroll County residents, Mary Hurt Wright hopes to enlist clergy and others interested in creating a retreat center where her grandfather’s legacy can live on and attain yet another revival.
“My grandfather loved music and loved family,” Wright said. “We want to extend that love to the surrounding community.
“We’re hoping that by Father’s Day, before people get too busy with summer activities, we can have a homecoming out here,” Wright said.
The homecoming is to take place on hallowed ground, across the wide meadow from John Hurt’s tiny house, now a museum celebrating and documenting his musical career. Across the grassy expanse, next to a winding gravel road, the old St. James Baptist Church, moved eight miles from its original site, sits waiting to be used again.
“St. James was a mecca for the African-American community,” Wright said. During her grandfather’s life, it was a gathering place for the burgeoning African-American community in Avalon, most of them agricultural workers who survived on faith, fellowship and music.
“The last funeral at St. James was my grandmother’s,” Wright said. “My father was an usher. All my siblings sang in the choir, and we were all baptized in a pond near the church.”
Every year, St. James had a big revival the second week of May. Now Wright and the Mississippi John Hurt Foundation hope to have a grand reopening, family revival and gathering of people of all races and cultures at the church to reinstitute it and launch a new initiative.
Wright, who lives in Chicago and is a teacher in a troubled inner-city neighborhood, envisions the Hurt property as a retreat center where women in need of community connections and spiritual renewal can come for time away from the difficulties of their lives, as well as a camp for youth to come and experience time in a peaceful place with music providing a foundation for understanding.
To accomplish that, she first needs to make connections with community leaders, clergy, educators and others.
“We want to reach out to anyone in the area who had a connection with St. James and invite them to come out and get reconnected,” she said. “And we want anyone from Greenwood or Carrollton or the surrounding counties who’s interested in what we’re doing here to come and join us.”
According to the Mississippi John Hurt Foundation’s annual report, Wright and others involved with the foundation conducted dialogues with prospective collaborators around the country in 2017 in preparation for expanding their work.
That includes continuing the festival and growing it, and it includes a community service vision inspired by Mississippi John Hurt’s life and work.
“When I established the foundation, my goal was to create something in keeping with the spirit my grandfather brought to his music,” Wright said in the report. “He did not live an untroubled life nor in an untroubled time. In a profound way, however, he rose above those troubles … borne aloft by character, faith, music and a great heart. Strength, joy and love of God radiate from his music.”
The foundation’s mission — to foster educational activities that decisively improve the lives of disadvantaged young people and at-risk women in our community — is in its infancy and will take an important first step in early summer with the gathering at St. James.
Anyone with family or historical connections to the church or the Avalon community, anyone who will share the news of this gathering with their church congregation or community group, and anyone who wants to help organize the gathering locally is urged to contact Mary Hurt Wright at 312-810-1954.
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
