World-renowned acoustic guitar master John Hurt, an important figure in the 1960s folk blues revival, spent most of his life doing farm work around Avalon in Carroll County and performing at parties and local gatherings. Born according to a family bible on July 3, 1893, in Teoc, though other sources suggested dates from 1892 to 1900, he began playing guitar around age nine and by twenty was performing at parties and square dances, sometimes with local white fiddler Willie Narmour, who recommended him to OKeh Records. In 1928 Hurt traveled to Memphis and New York to record 78 rpm discs that included murder ballads, blues, religious songs, and his own compositions, recordings later regarded as blues classics, though they apparently had little effect on his lifestyle. He continued to play regularly for local audiences at house parties, picnics, night spots, work sheds, hunting lodges, and the Valley Store, sometimes with his older brother Junious on harmonica, while working chiefly as a farmer and also laboring in a Jackson factory, at a local gravel pit, for Illinois Central Railroad, and for the Works Progress Administration. Mississippi John Hurt's delicate vocals, inventive fingerpicking, warm personality, and gentle style, much of it rooted in material that predated the blues, stood in stark contrast to the harsher approaches of Delta musicians such as Son House and Charley Patton. After record collector Tom Hoskins used Hurt’s 1928 song “Avalon Blues” to locate him in Avalon in 1963, Hurt moved to Washington, D.C., recorded several albums and sessions for the Library of Congress, and became a popular and beloved performer on the folk music circuit, appearing at festivals, colleges, and coffeehouses and finally earning a living from music. His admirers included the Lovin’ Spoonful, whose name came from a line in “Coffee Blues.” In 1965 he moved to Grenada, Mississippi, where he died on November 2, 1966.