In 1963, a young blues scout named Tom Hoskins drove from Washington, D.C. to a wooden cabin in Avalon, Mississippi and asked a 70-something sharecropper to pick up a guitar and prove he was the man who had recorded a handful of obscure sides for Okeh Records in 1928. The clue that led him there was hidden in a song title: Avalon Blues. This episode reconstructs the life of Mississippi John Hurt, born John Smith Hurt in the 1890s in Teoc, Mississippi to formerly enslaved sharecropping parents. At nine he secretly taught himself on a guitar belonging to a boarder, William Henry Carson, whenever the man left to court a local woman, developing a delicate ragtime-influenced fingerpicking style with an alternating thumb bass and syncopated melodies, far from the heavy slide-driven Delta blues usually associated with the state.

The conversation follows how fiddler Willie Narmour’s 1928 contest win led producer Tommy Rockwell to audition Hurt at home, and how sessions in Memphis and New York produced 20 tracks recorded under orders not to move a muscle, leaving him with a stiff neck for days. It explains how modest sales and the Great Depression sent him back to farming for 35 years, how Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music seeded a new generation of collectors, and how his 1963 rediscovery placed him at the Newport and Philadelphia folk festivals, on national television and in Library of Congress sessions before his death from a heart attack in November 1966 at around 73.

• How learning in secret, without instruction, let Hurt invent a musical language of his own
• Why he turned down a traveling medicine show and stayed in Avalon for decades
• How the rigid demands of 1928 acoustic recording may have shaped his hushed, conversational delivery
• Why commercial failure in the Depression accidentally preserved his style untouched by trends
• How he avoided becoming a museum piece and became an elder statesman of the folk revival