Hurt so good

Bill Morrissey does Mississippi John

by Ted Drozdowski

Bill Morrissey's new CD is a payback to the late blues songster Mississippi John Hurt. Fair enough, since the singer/songwriter thinks he stole his first Hurt album. "It was Mississippi John Hurt Today! And if I did steal it, it was from Concord Music about a month after Hurt died, in 1966."

But Morrissey's not out to make amends for a little petty theft with his new Songs of Mississippi John Hurt (Philo), which reaches stores this Tuesday. He's saluting the man who inspired the very foundation of his musical approach while possibly introducing a younger generation of acoustic musicians to one of the more charming figures in blues history.

Morrissey recalls, "I'd been listening to the Delta blues guys like Robert Johnson, Skip James, Charlie Patton. I still hadn't heard the blues songsters, which would be John and Mance Lipscomb. I put on the John Hurt album and just went nuts. It had this gentle rolling feel; it really swings. I had just started to play guitar and I had a friend who knew open tuning -- this must have been 10th grade. He taught me how to get the thumb going so you pluck the two low D's in open-D tuning, then start to pick the melody off of that . . . and I've stayed with that all my life."

To beautiful result. Morrissey's graceful Hurt-inspired style of fingerpicking has brilliantly borne the lyrics of his six previous solo albums. A speedy variation on Hurt's roll, slide, and tumble keeps songs like Morrissey's class comedy "Car and Driver" -- from 1989's Standing Eight -- light and peppery. A slow, stately approach underlines the ennui in his ballad of emotional displacement, "The Man from Out of Town," on '92's Inside.

For those unaware of Morrissey's musical debt to Hurt, it might seem odd to hear this most New England of singer-songwriters performing tunes like Mississippi John's signature "Avalon Blues" or "Beulah Land," numbers that seem like patches torn from the fabric of the American South. After all, the Massachusetts-based Morrissey has devoted much of his songwriting and his debut novel, 1996's Knopf-published Epson, to the lost souls and resilient spirits of his native region. His riveting portrait of the broken man "John Haber," the settings in his ballad of icy loneliness "These Cold Fingers," and the romantic fireside fantasy "Birches" bear the scent of crisp New Hampshire air as surely as Hurt's work shimmers with lazy Delta humidity.

But Hurt often wrote about the people of his home place with a devotion to detail similar to Morrissey's, whose early lyric-writing was inspired more by the Beatles and Dylan than by the blues. And both Hurt and Morrissey share the secrets of how the land a man grows up on affects his character. Then there's the humor -- an important part of Morrissey's writing and between-song conversation from stage, and the cornerstone of Hurt songs like "Funky Butt" and "Shake That Thing."

Although Songs of Mississippi John Hurt respects Hurt's legacy, it's no museum piece. "I'm amazed nobody has done an album of Mississippi John Hurt songs," Morrissey says. "I've heard John Hurt songs done so many ways, by Doc Watson, etc., etc. But what I didn't want to do is another acoustic blues album, just sticking to the one-guitar style of Hurt's original versions. My feeling was, these 15 songs are so good they'll hold up to any arrangement that doesn't destroy their original feeling."

So Morrissey traveled back to New Orleans's Ultrasonic Studios and rounded up a coterie of Crescent City ringers, much as he did for 1996's You'll Never Get to Heaven. Working with his producer/manager/wife, Ellen Karas, and his friend the folksinger and guitarist Peter Keane, Morrissey and his studio players recorded arrangements that include such distinctly New Orleans flourishes as the street-parade beat on "First Shot Missed Him," the trumpet melody of "I'm Satisfied," and the beautiful piano-and-sax treatment of "Avalon Blues."

"That was a song he did in 1928 and . . . well, my whole attitude with all of his songs was to be respectful but not do it exactly the way he did it. On something like `I'm Satisfied,' my guitar line is pretty close to what John played, but it's got a trumpet and that rhythm section."

For Morrissey, it was the right time for his Hurt payback. "I'm finishing up this second book that I've been working on for two years. It was great to take a break from the book and play guitar for two months to get ready for the studio. I put the book aside, and now I'm happy to be back with it, finishing up.

Morrissey's new novel is named Imaginary Runner. "It's about a guy, roughly 39, who's taking his first solo trip across the country to meet the 19-year-old daughter he's never met." And Morrissey has just hit the road himself, launching a tour for Songs of Mississippi John Hurt that will bring him back for some Boston-area concerts in early March.