make me a pallet

Mississippi John Hurt, Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor

{from Complete Studio Recordings; source: Ordinary Finds }

I've been listening to this over and over. Like good poetry it gains from repeated hearings. As others have pointed out, this is not mean blues, it's graceful, subtle, and sweet. The music is more complex than at first it seems. The voice is whiskey mellow and the phrasing is relaxed rather than intense.

Although this recording is an old friend, it hasn't lost any of its appeal through familiarity. I first heard John Hurt sing it back in 1964 when a bunch of us drove to Newport for the Blues Festival. With crowds of other happy people we slept on the beach, ate hot dogs, and soaked up music. As it happens you can find me in a photo of the audience listing to John Hurt that memorable time. The image appears on the sleeves of the LP record set that Vanguard issued some months later and it looks like this.

I'm located at about 11 o'clock next to my brother, by two college classmates, and behind my best friend and suitemate.


Mississippi John Hurt had a face that showed his soft-spoken gentleness and dignified, poised bearing. To me it also showed his resilience, something of the hardships he'd endured, and the patient endurance often seen in photos that show sharecroppers of his generation.

{image source: mleddy.blogspot.com}

{source: Ordinary finds}

{source: delta-slider.blogspot.com}

He was a field hand, later a share-cropper in a tiny hamlet called Avalon, Mississippi. Hardly anything remains of Avalon today. There had to be a country store because, with just a mule-drawn wagon or their own feet for transportation, most share-croppers couldn't survive without one, and the remains of that store can still be found in Avalon. There's hardly anything else — a few houses plus his old home, now the Mississippi John Hurt Museum which looks like this.

{museum: msjohnhurtmuseum.com}

Like most institutions in the Jim-Crow South, farming on shares was exploitive, but, within that harsh environment, it was also a repository of many rural virtues. Share-croppers could easily move their few possessions from one shack to another, seeking better land, better land-owners, better contracts regarding the provisions needed before planting and the division of proceeds after the crop was in. The work required families to work together, each member except the very youngest taking part in running their borrowed bit of farmstead. Having little or no money they bartered and, in hard times, tended to give one another unselfish communal support.

There were many men and women who grew up with memories of rich black soil warming their bare feet and hot sunshine making intense shadows in the crop rows as they hoed out weeds or picked off weevils. And many of them felt privileged to have lived through that time despite the recurrent periods of suffering they were forced to endure.[1] Hurt himself turned down opportunities to leave saying he "just never wanted to get away from home."[2] Though hours were long, the life was not one of unrelenting work. When very young, Hurt found time to teach himself to play a borrowed guitar and later developed his skill while doing music for Saturday night dances near home. Once "discovered" and recorded, he spent time in cities and festivals like the one I attended, but always returned home and, at the end of his life, died in Avalon as he had long lived there.

The lyrics to Make Me a Pallet give you no sense of the art he brings to their expression. The story is fairly routine in the country blues genre — a man and woman together, each seeking to hide from a jealous lover — but there's nothing salacious in Hurt's treatment of the theme. He asks for comfort not ecstasy. He's tired and will be happy to be bedded down low, warm and safe, away from cold sleet and snow. He wants to keep close, to be kept close.

Hurt uses the song's broad vowel sounds to express a longing for a temporary refuge. He makes wonderful use of its long "o" sounds — low, door, and floor, along with more, snow, and go. The repeated sounds, words, and phrases subtly alter with each iteration. In its many variations, the word me attains something special that I find difficult to express, particularly when held, as they are in the last two lines of the chorus.

Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor

Mississippi John Hurt

Make me down a pallet on your floor
Make me down
Make me a pallet down soft and low
Make me a pallet on your floor

Up the country forty miles or more
I'm goin up the country while there's cold sleet and snow
I'm goin up the country while there's cold sleet and snow
No telling how much further I may go

Just make me down
Make me down
Make me a pallet down soft and low
Make me a pallet on your floor

Well, sleeping, my back and shoulders tired
Well, sleeping, my back and shoulders tired
The way I'm sleeping my back and shoulders tired
Gonna turn over and try it on the side

Oh make me down
Make me down
Make me a pallet down soft and low
Make me a pallet on your floor

Don't you let my good girl catch you here
Don't let my good girl catch you here
Oh she might shoot you, like to cut and starve you too
No tellin what she might do

Yes make me down
Make me down
Make me a pallet down soft and low
Make me a pallet on your floor

Make it baby close behind your door
Make it baby close behind your door
Make me a pallet close behind your door
Make it where your good man'll never go

Oh make me down
Make me down
Make me a pallet on your floor
Make me a pallet on your floor

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Here are some photos that Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott took for the Farm Security Administration between 1936 and 1939. All come from collections in the Prints and Photos Division of the Library of Congress.

{Mississippi Delta Negro children by Dorothea Lange, 1936 July}

{Sharecropper's cabin and sharecropper's wife, ten miles south of Jackson, Mississippi, by Dorothea Lange, 1937 June}

{Negro sharecropper and wife. Mississippi. They have no tools, stock, equipment, or garden. By Dorothea Lange, 1937 June-July}

{Feet of Negro cotton hoer near Clarksdale, Mississippi, by Dorothea Lange, 1937 June}

{Negroes fishing in creek near cotton plantations outside Belzoni, Mississippi, by Marion Post Wolcott, 1939 Oct}

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Notes:

[1] I've done a number of blog posts on aspects of share-cropping, including these:

• Walker Evans
• sharecropper families of the 1930s
• the Whitfield and Lyons families, North Carolina,1939
• Wheeley's Church
• Tucks
• sharecropper cabin on hillside farm
• Caroline Atwater
• Whitfields, Bains, and a heritage of slavery
• roughhousing
• wasn't anything to steal
• working families
• better than money
• in the front row of the white folks' church
• aint much of a hand at going to town
• stories of the rural South in the 1930s
• a farmhouse morning
• a people bound up
• Sams, Trollope, & Lange
• old cars
• farming cotton on shares
• men of Macon County, July 1937
• thirteen-year old sharecropper boy

[2] The quote is given in the wikipedia article on MJH. It is taken from Lawrence Cohen's essay accompaying Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings. (Columbia/Legacy, CD, 1996)