As a thirteen-year-old boy, singer-songwriter Peter Case used to run to his hometown library to rifle through the album racks. Sifting through the blues section, he came across an album cover featuring an elderly man that struck him immediately -- the legendary Mississippi John Hurt. "There was something so attractive about it as a kid," says Case. "I took it home, and it really moved me. It was my door into blues music, like old-time American music."

Now, as the producer of Vanguard's forthcoming Mississippi John Hurt tribute album, Avalon Blues, Case wants to open that door to a new generation. Among the artists who have contributed songs to the set (due in June) are Lucinda Williams , Beck, Steve Earle , Ben Harper, John Hiatt and Gillian Welch. Even Bill Morrissey, who cut his own tribute album to Hurt in 1999, got onboard with Case and cut the beloved "Pay Day" for the album.

"They're all bringing their own thing to it, and making it sound like their own songs," Case says of the contributing artists. "Lucinda does a song, and it sounds just like one of her tunes." Williams originally intended to revisit Hurt's "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor," which she recorded for her 1979 debut album, but she changed her mind when she got to the studio and cut "Angels Laid in My Way" instead. "She really sounded inspired and just brought such an intensity to it," raves Case, who also singles out Beck's cover of "Stagolee" and Earle's "Candy Man" as standouts on the album. He says some of the covers are very traditional, while others are anything but. He points to his ex-wife Victoria Williams' take on "Since I Laid My Burden Down" as evidence of the latter. "She's playing wah-wah banjo on it. It sounds very African."

However eclectic some of the songs may have come off, Case says his goal was to keep the spirit behind the album as true to Hurt as possible. "What kills me about John Hurt," Case says, "is his soul, his beautiful voice, and the spirit you got from the person you felt coming through the music."

While many people think of the blues as a raunchy, wailing "my baby done left me" type of music, Mississippi John Hurt was anything but the average bluesman. His voice, as soft and quiet as a breeze blowing through a screen door, gave his soft-spoken songs and spirituals a languor and calm that predated the impending blues storm of the Chicago electric age of the late Forties. Hurt exemplified a gentler side of the blues, a country blues coaxed out of his modest guitar with dexterous finger picking. Initially "discovered" in 1928, the onset of the Depression sent Hurt back into obscurity until his rediscovery in 1963, as a seventy-one-year-old Mississippi sharecropper who should have been thinking about retirement and not a life on the road as a bluesman.

"He lived his whole life and got rediscovered, and then he went out into this world where all of the sudden he's playing in front of 2,000 college kids a quarter of his age," marvels Case. "It's a wild story." Some of that story will be detailed in the album's liner notes, penned by Hurt's former manager Dick Waterman. Case says Waterman is also contributing some never-before-published photos of Hurt. In further keeping with the nurturing spirit of Hurt, Vanguard Records will donate a percentage of the royalties to the Delta Blues Museum's Art and Education Center in Clarksdale, Mississippi. "They're running a program that teaches kids music and gets them instruments," Case explains. "It's a program that goes straight back into that area."

"The different people who knew Hurt all said he was a beautiful, loving man. He showed that through his music," Case says. "To keep it at its simplest level, it's great music, and we're trying to get it out to a new group of people."

Track listing for Avalon Blues:

Bruce Cockburn, "Avalon, My Home Town"
Chris Smither, "Frankie & Albert"
Mark Selby, "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor"
Steve & Justin Earle, "Candy Man"
Lucinda Williams, "Angels Laid in My Way"
Geoff Muldaur,"The Chicken"
John Hiatt, "I'm Satisfied"
Victoria Williams, "Since I've Laid My Burden Down"
Beck, "Stagolee"
Taj Mahal, "My Creole Belle"
Bill Morrissey, "Pay Day"
Ben Harper, "Sliding Delta"
Gillian Welch, "Beulah Land"
Dave Alvin and Peter Case, "Monday Morning Blues"
Alvin Youngblood Hart, "Here Am I, Oh Lord, Send Me"

MARIAN MONTGOMERY
(March 13, 2001)