Style
Hurt incorporated a fast, pick-less, syncopated fingerpicking style that he taught himself. He was influenced by very few people; but does recall an elderly, unrecorded, blues singer from that area, Rufus Hanks, who played twelve-string guitar and harmonica. He also recalls listening to the country singer Jimmie Rodgers. Many of his songs were in very basic keys (C, G, D, F, etc.), his fingers picking notes within the chords. On occasion, Hurt would use an open tuning and a slide, as he did in his arrangement of "The Ballad of Casey Jones".
Read more about this topic: Mississippi John Hurt
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A style does not go out of style as long as it adapts itself to its period. When there is an incompatibility between the style and a certain state of mind, it is never the style that triumphs.”
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“I am so tired of taking to others
translating my life for the deaf, the blind,
the “I really want to know what your life is like without giving up any of my privileges
to live it” white women
the “I want to live my white life with Third World women’s style and keep my skin
class privileges” dykes”
—Lorraine Bethel, African American lesbian feminist poet. “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” Lines 49-54 (1979)