A little bit of everybody has recorded material created by Mississippi John Hurt including Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Jerry Garcia, Beck, Doc Watson, John McCutcheon, Taj Mahal, Bruce Cockburn, David Johansen, Bill Morrissey, Gillian Welch, Josh Ritter, Chris Smither, Guthrie Thomas, Parsonsfield, and Rory Block.
Hurt was raised in Avalon, Mississippi, taught himself to play the guitar around the age of nine while he worked as a sharecropper. He began guitar and singing at dances and parties. His first recordings, made for Okeh Records in 1928, were commercial failures, and he continued to work as a farmer.Dick Spottswood and Tom Hoskins, a blues enthusiast, located Hurt in 1963 and persuaded him to move to Washington, D.C. where he was recorded by the Library of Congress in 1964. Hurt returned to Mississippi, where he died, in Grenada, in 1966, aged about 73 years old.