What He Played

By Jim Ohlschmidt

Until his rediscovery in 1963, John Hurt played nondescript, run-of-the-mill guitars like the first one his mother bought him. Beginning with his arrival in Washington, DC, friends and fans furnished Hurt with a number of different guitars that he used onstage and in the studio. According to acoustic-blues aficionado and Stella guitar collector Neil Harpe, Hurt was playing a Harmony-style Stella flattop before Tom Hoskins gave him a Gibson J-45, which had been refinished natural and had custom fingerboard inlays, and an Emory guitar, built around 1900, with a slotted headstock and a rectangular fingerboard inlay at the 12th fret that said "Emory."

After his celebrated debut at the Newport Folk Festival, the Newport Folk Foundation wanted to buy Hurt a guitar and took him to Fretted Instruments in New York City, where he modestly chose a Guild F-30. He played this guitar on the Vanguard album (Live!) recorded at Oberlin College and the live sets heard on Memorial Anthology.

Stefan Grossman was an avid student of Hurt's music, and he loaned Hurt a 1930 Martin OM-45 for the studio recordings he made for Vanguard (collected on The Complete Studio Recordings), many of which are his finest tracks. The guitar sounds fantastic on those records; sadly, Grossman no longer owns the instrument.

One of the last guitars Hurt owned was an unnamed, custom-built, auditorium-style flattop with inlaid wood binding and Hurt's name inscribed in a block marker at the 12th fret. This is the guitar he plays on Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest TV show, and it's also seen in photographs of Hurt picking on the front porch of his Grenada, Mississippi house."

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