It’s a part of legend that Andres Segovia, after hearing John Hurt’s guitar playing for the first time, demanded to know who the second guitarist was. There was none, of course, though listening to the songs of this tribute, very few of which come from practicing blues guitarists, you get both a sense of musical awe for Hurt’s effortlessly crystalline melodies and his subtle, prismatic playing.
Without Hurt’s guitar work — which revealed the piano-like qualities of the guitar, especially that thumb-alternates-the-bassline and the fingers-pick-the-melody right-hand technique — there really would be no singer-songwriter genre as we know it. From Bob Dylan to Eric Andersen to Steve Earle to Greg Brown, those guitar patters are behind the best of songs and writers in the genre.
In fact, it’s the singer-songwriters that turn in the most affecting performances on this disc produced by Peter Case. The bluesmen — Taj Mahal, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Mark Selby — hold their own with Hurt’s tunes but don’t find any emotions he hadn’t already put forth. Bruce Cockburn, on the other hand, turns “Avalon, My Home Town” into a driving Delta chant, with a few ad-libbed lines here and there, and weird, subliminal keyboard tones; Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, who seem to be getting more and more mysterious and riveting in their take on traditional music, sing “Beulah Land” as if they really were “way beyond the sky”; and Bill Morrissey (who cut an entire solo tribute to Hurt in 1999) manages to be both cutting and slyly comic on “Pay Day”.
Victoria Williams and Beck, however, sound lost. The former caterwauls and bleats over “Since I’ve Laid My Burden Down”; the latter just talks and plucks through “Stagolee” as if the song, and Hurt’s dissemination of it, didn’t mean enough to risk exertion. Lucinda Williams takes a similar laid-back approach, but manages to breathe new life into Hurts’ most elegiac (and highly covered) tune “The Angels Laid Him Away”. She sounds like she’s falling — tenderly, fatefully — in love with Hurt for the first time. The best of these performances make you feel the same way.
