Topic: Mississippi John Hurt Releases

[outfidel]

Does anyone have an idea why the Library of Congress spent the time to record all of MJH and never used an inch of video??

Dave -

I read a quote recently from somebody (might've been Dick Spottswood or Mike Seeger) that went something like this: John Hurt left us so soon after his re-discovery, that we didn't realize what a treasure we had among us.

I get the sense that, after MJH passed away, there was a much greater effort to video tape the surviving artists from that generation (e.g., Rev Gary Davis, Mance Lipscomb, Libba Cotten et al).

"Don't it always seem to go / That ya don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" -- Joni

[Bunker Hill]

You have to keep in mind, that during the folk revival in the early '60s portable videotape equipment as we know it did not exist. Nowadays, anyone with limited skills can shoot a video.
But in the early sixties, they would have been shot on 16mm film with sync sound. There were much fewer people who had this equipment and the talents to use it. It's just a matter of bad timing. If these musicians were around today, they would be videotaped very easily.

Quite so. In fact those present at the session probably snapped good old fashioned photographs, like the one seen on the reverse of the first of three Flyright LPs released in 1980. The photo shows MJH perched on the edge of a table singing into a microphone with Rae Korson and Joe Hickson looking on. In the control booth there's someone who looks remarkably like a 'younger' Dick Spottswood.