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Portal:Mississippi/Selected biography/1
"Mississippi" John Smith Hurt (born July 2, 1892 in Teoc, Mississippi in Carroll County - died November 2, 1966 in Grenada, Mississippi) was an influential blues singer and guitarist.

Raised in Avalon, Mississippi, he learned to play guitar at age 9. He spent much of his youth playing old time music for friends and dances, earning a living as a farm hand into the 1920s. In 1923 he often partnered with the fiddle player Willie Narmour (Carroll County Blues) as a substitute for his regular partner Shell Smith. When Narmour got a chance to record for Okeh Records in reward for winning first place in a 1928 fiddle contest, Narmour recommended John Hurt to OKeh Records producer Tommy Rockwell. After auditioning "Monday Morning Blues" at his home, he took part in two recording sessions, in Memphis and New York City (See Discography below). The "Mississippi" tag was added by OKeh as a sales gimmick. After the commercial failure of the resulting disc and OKeh records going out of business during the depression, Hurt returned to Avalon and obscurity working as a sharecropper and playing local parties and dances. (read more . . . )

Portal:Mississippi/Selected biography/2
Piyush "Bobby" Jindal (born June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) is a Louisiana politician. Jindal was elected as a Republican to the United States House of Representatives on November 2, 2004, from Louisiana's First Congressional District, based in the suburbs of New Orleans.

Jindal was born in Baton Rouge to recently arrived Indian immigrants who were attending graduate school. Jindal was a Hindu but converted to Catholicism as a teenager. He is the only Indian-American currently serving in Congress, and the second in congressional history after Dalip Singh Saund, a Democrat who represented California's 29th District from 1957 to 1963.

He was chosen by Scholastic Update magazine as "one of America's top 10 extraordinary young people for the next millennium." He was India Abroad Person of the Year 2005. In 1997, he married Supriya Jolly (born 1972). The couple has three children, Selia, Shaan, and Slade. On Tuesday, August 15, 2006, Jindal assisted in delivering his third child when his wife awoke, in labor. The child was born before ambulances had time to respond.

On Monday, January 22, 2007, Jindal announced his candidacy for Governor of Louisiana in the upcoming election. (read more . . . )