"Payday"

A few weeks before his death in November 1966, Mississippi John Hurt’s rendition of “Payday” was released as the opening track on his Today album for Vanguard Records.

At the time, many fans believed the 74-year-old bluesman wrote the song, despite his introduction in which he characterized it as “an old tune… a ‘bandit tune.’” And we now know that a quarter of a century earlier, folklorist John Lomax recorded a version of “Payday” by lesser-known blues artists Willie Ford and Lucious Curtis in Natchez, Mississippi.

Still, it is the John Hurt version that has become loved among syncopated fingerpicking guitarists; to this day his take on “Payday” is taught in classes and on YouTube videos.

The John Hurt Odyssey: Part I

The Today album, hitting record stores in October 1966, marked the end of a remarkable three years for the venerable blues artist, who was born the son of freed slaves around 1892 in Teoc, Mississippi. John Smith Hurt grew up in the Mississippi Delta, living in Avalon, which sits midway between Greenwood and Holcomb just west of Highway 51.

He left school at age 10 to be a farm hand and was taught guitar by a local songster and family friend. Hurt lived most of his life without electricity, did hard labor of all sorts and played music as a hobby at local dances.

In the late 1920s, performing with local fiddler Willie Narmour, he won a competition and a chance to record with Okeh Records in two sessions, one in Memphis and another in New York City.

John Hurt: Part II

The resulting records were not a great commercial success — John went back to farming and raising a family that would grow to 14 children — but a quarter of a century later, his music entered the folk music canon. That’s when two of those 1928 tracks were included in the holy grail of American music, Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, considered one of the main catalysts for the folk and blues revival of the 1960s and ‘70s.

A decade later, in 1962, the presence of those old cuts — “Frankie” and “Spike Driver Blues” — on in the Smith anthology prompted musicologist Dick Spottswood and his friend, Tom Hoskins, to track Hurt down.

Hoskins persuaded him to perform several songs for his tape recorder to make sure he was the genuine article. Quickly convinced — in fact, folkies found Hurt even more proficient than he had been in his younger Okeh recording days — Hoskins encouraged him to move to Washington, D.C., to perform for a broader audience.

For the last three years of his life, Hurt performed extensively at colleges, concert halls and coffeehouses, appearing on television shows ranging from “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson to Pete Seeger’s “Rainbow Quest” on public TV. Much of Hurt’s repertoire also was recorded for the Library of Congress, and his final tunes, recorded in 1964 and released two years later, are on Today.

He also developed a delightful friendship with a young folksinger named Patrick Sky who produced that final album for Vanguard, where “Payday” is the opening track.

Deeper Roots of “Payday”

By the way, in the brand new book, Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs & Hidden Histories, published last spring, author Elijah Wald finds a much longer tail on the tune, not to mention a possible connection to another Flood favorite.

Wald notes that back in 1908, Missouri pianist Blind Boone published a pair of “Southern Rag” medleys that African Americans were singing in that region around the turn of the century.

“Medley number one was subtitled ‘Strains from the Alleys’,” Wald writes, and included the first publication of “Making Me a Pallet on the Floor.’”

Wald says the medley also featured “a song that probably reaches back to slavery times and would be recorded in later years as ‘Pay Day,’ ‘Reuben,’ and various other names.”

Our Take on the Tune

Purists say this doesn’t sound much like Mississippi John Hurt’s original, but that’s pretty much by design.

Once The Flood folks learn a song, they usually stop listening to the original so it is free to find its own form in the Floodisphere. That’s their take on what Pete Seeger’s folklorist father Charles called “the folk process.”

And in this instance, “Payday” has been processing in Floodlandia for more than 20 years now, ever since its inclusion on the band’s first studio album back in 2001.

Here’s the current state of its evolution, taken from a recent rehearsal.