Frankie

In February 1928, a gentle 35-year-old farmer named Mississippi John Hurt traveled to Memphis to record for Okeh Records. Unlike the harsh, aggressive Delta blues musicians of his era, Hurt played a syncopated, alternating-thumb fingerpicking style that sounded like a ragtime piano. On "Frankie," a traditional murder ballad, his sweet, whispery vocals completely belied the song's bloody narrative of a woman shooting her unfaithful lover. The record was a commercial failure, sending Hurt back to his farm in Avalon, Mississippi, until he was famously rediscovered by young acoustic guitar enthusiasts during the 1963 folk revival.