CD

Mississippi John Hurt, Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 OKeh Recordings (Columbia/Legacy). Born in a tiny, isolated Mississippi town in 1892, Hurt taught himself how to pick the guitar in a smoothly syncopated style that had nothing to do with the rawer playing of the Delta bluesmen elsewhere in the state. OKeh cut thirteen solo sides of his singing and playing, after which he vanished into the shadows until he became the first of the Mississippi acoustic bluesmen to be rediscovered and re-recorded, not long before his death in 1966. The albums he made in old age for Vanguard circulated far more widely, but his easygoing, deliciously danceable 78s, reissued on CD in 1996, are even better (TT).