Vox Populi
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Jianqing Zheng: Site Visit
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The Valley Store in Avalon, Mississippi, long abandoned, still holds its worn-out sign above the locked double doors. Many years ago, John Hurt lived nearby. He would walk to the store to buy food or play blues. The bluesman rests in peace in the woods a few miles away.
neglected graveyard
silent stones
smeared with lichen
lie or lean
in high grasses
Locked in the store are shelves and counters covered with a thick layer of powdery dust. For blues lovers who need a tour of the John Hurt Museum—a mud-colored shotgun house tucked away in the hills, a faded note on the dusty window gives the name and phone number of the guide.
stop by a blues site
for a snapshot
three dogs appear
from an abandoned shack
to look curiously
Standing like an onlooker by the store is John Hurt’s blues marker. On one side of the store lies an old, dismantled piano, its keys littered like scrap wood blocks. Hurt is gone, and the store stays, looking bluesier. A newly paved black tar road winds past it and swoops down the hill to straighten through the cotton fields.
dusk wind
rolls tattered clouds
into cotton bales
all the way
to the horizon
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Copyright 2025 Jianqing Zheng
Jianqing Zheng, who also publishes under the name John Zheng, is chair and professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University. His books include The Dog Years of Reeducation (Madville, 2023), a series of haibun recounting his experiences as a youth during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
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My senior year of high school in Memphis was filled with music, but I missed John Hurt. He died about when I got there. Still, a friend of mine and I listened to a local Blues radio station that played mostly Chicago Blues, more hip than the Delta blues in 1966 Memphis. My Sunday school teacher was Knox Phillips, son of Sam Phillips who discovered Elvis, Jerry Lee, and Orbison at Sun records. We talked music all the time. So today, knowing I had missed a treasure, found a greatest hits album of John Hurt, and omg, he was not only a great guitar player, but a dynamite singer too. Thanks for sharing about him, and his Mississippi milieu. It’s never too late to find something wonderful.
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Thanks, Jim. Our backgrounds are similar. I didn’t come to love jazz and blues until I was in my early twenties when I hung out with musicians. Such a gift to listen to delta blues now….
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An elegant elegy for the rural South–a site visit that does more than sight see.
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Thanks, Dana. It’s a pleasure to hear from you.
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Somehow, the second part of my comment, about my brother’s calling JH ‘the sweetest human being I’ve ever met,’ was cut off.Sent from my iPhone
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Thanks for completing the comment.
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I remember the end of high school, beginning of college, Berkeley Folk Festival and some events at SDSU. Saw John Hurt, Fred McDowell, and others from the blues scene, and met Joe Turner at a bar in Watts. Somewhere I may still have vinyl with blues—mostly Mississippi and Chicago. Memories, sigh.
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A magical time.
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My late brother- long story- was the legal guardian of Hurt’s grandchildren.
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Wow. Would love to hear that story
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I loved lingering there, thanks to your perfect, triple gazes. Thank you, John!
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What a lovely journey through that world. It stops me in my tracks, grateful to be held. This poetry and prose has to power to transcend our accustomed hearts and carry us to places we’ve never been. Its a perfect time to go…
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I love this combination. A Chinese American professor borrows a Japanese literary form to describe his visit to the place where a great American bluesman lived.
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