MTSU’s James E. Walker Library will host a free public concert in tribute to Mississippi John Hurt at 6 p.m. Friday, March 30, in the library’s first-floor atrium.

Mississippi John Hurt

The Fedora Brothers, also known as Bruce Nemerov and Gene Bush, will perform numbers made famous by the blues legend to mark the closing of an exhibit about his career.

The display was produced by the Arts Center of Cannon County in partnership with the MTSU Center for Popular Music with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Following the concert, the exhibit will move to the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Miss., where it will become part of the permanent collection there.

Hurt was a self-taught guitarist and singer whose performances at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, in coffeehouses and on the college circuit influenced a generation of folk, blues, country and bluegrass artists.

Nemerov, a former audio specialist with the Center for Popular Music, produced the CD “John Work III: Recording Black Culture” and won a Grammy award for writing its liner notes. Bush was a friend and student of Mississippi John Hurt in the 1960s before moving to Nashville in the early 1970s.

The Arts Center of Cannon County will have “Discovery: The Rebirth of John Hurt,” a CD release from its Spring Fed Records label, available for purchase at the event. Copies of “Mississippi John Hurt: His Life, His Times, His Blues,” a new biography by Phil Ratcliffe, also will be available for purchase.

For more information, contact Kristen Keene at 615-898-5376 or Kristen.keene@mtsu.edu.

— Gina K. Logue (Gina.Logue@mtsu.edu)