Michael Hurley (1941- 2025) – Americana UK
The passing of Michael Hurley who died on April 1st aged 83 closes the chapter on a remarkable musician. AUK wrote of him a while back that he “ploughed his own unique furrow of pastoral, homespun folk-country blues, long before he was heralded by the freak-folk scene who made an industry of it. Hurley’s albums feel home brew, recycled from whatever may be lying around: a bit of twine, a second-hand joke, a rusted nail, a Scottish border ballad, the results are unique, gentle, and spooky.”
Michael Hurley was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1941. He came from a vaguely bohemian family, his father produced light operettas and the family spent time in Florida and California before returning to Bucks County. By his teens he was painting, writing comic books (featuring his two collie dogs, Boone and Count, who eventually were immortalised as the cartoonish Boone and Jocko) and writing songs. Hurley’s first musical venture was with two-like-minded friends, Steve Weber and Robin Remaily, with whom he formed a band who apparently only played one gig (Weber went on to form The Holy Modal Rounders with Peter Stampfel, a band which Remaily also eventually joined). The Rounders, surely one of the first freak folk outfits, covered several of Hurley’s songs on their increasingly idiosyncratic 60s albums.
Hurley moved to New York in the early 60s, playing coffee houses but his time there was curtailed when he was hospitalised for several months with tuberculosis. Returning to Bucks County, a chance meeting with Fred Ramsey Jr. who worked for Moe Asch (Folkways founder) led to Hurley’s first record deal. ‘First Songs’, released by Folkways in 1964, finds a 22-year-old Hurley sounding much older than his years. As one writer has said, “Even then, he felt like some survivor of Old Weird America, some lingering vestige of the famed Harry Smith box set.” The album which contained one of Hurley’s most popular songs, ‘The Werewolf’, sold poorly and it wasn’t until 1971 that he returned to recording. Another Bucks County friend, Jesse Colin Young (of the Youngbloods) secured him a record deal with Warner Brothers via Young’s WB imprint Racoon Records. Two albums (‘Armchair Boogie’ and ‘Hi-Fi Snock Uptown’) were released but Racoon Records didn’t last long and the albums never really had a chance to be heard.
It was a most motley crew of outsiders who conspired next to bring Hurley back into view. ‘Have Moicy’, released on Rounder Records in 1976 was officially credited to Michael Hurley, The Unholy Modal Rounders and Jeffrey Frederick & The Clamtones. In the age of super groups such as CSN&Y, this crew were surely the supreme outsiders but the album gained traction with famed critic Robert Christgau hailing it as his best album of 1976. On the back of that Hurley released two more albums on Rounder Records, ‘Long Journey’ and ‘Snockgrass’ before spending some more time in the wilderness. From then on Hurley’s albums appeared on a variety of independent labels (including his own imprint Bellemeade Phonics where he sold cassettes and CD-Rs via mail order) until he released two albums on Devendra Banhart’s label Gnomonsong (in 2007 and 2009) and then finally found a home with Mississippi Records who released his final albums.
In the early 2000s, a generation of young artists began to be categorised as “freak folk,” their common denominator being knowledge of the Harry Smith anthology and an awareness of artists such as Hurley who came to be regarded, somewhat contrarily, as pioneers and also keepers of the flame. Nevertheless, Hurley benefitted from this newfound awareness finding a new audience to the extent that, in recent years, he could play to sizeable crowds while his earlier albums were polished up and reissued. There was a further boost when his song, ‘Hog Of The Forsaken’ was featured in the hit TV show ‘Deadwood’. In 2021 ‘Snockument’, a tribute album featuring Hurley songs recorded by Calexico, Cat Powers and Yo La Tengo among others was released. A lifelong itinerant he finally settled in 2002 in Astoria, Oregon, playing a monthly residence at Portland’s Laurelthirst bar and continued to tour on his own terms, stating in an interview, “So I stayed here and found a nice car for a good deal, a 1973 Dodge Coronet station wagon, I’m still driving it, and I used that to travel from then on. I’ve crossed the country in it six times, spent many a night sleeping in it as you can flatten the seats out and put down a mattress.”
Hurley’s world was peopled by crepuscular creatures, werewolves and revenants, anthropomorphic hounds, hobos and bums along with an element of 1950s sci-fi comic books and television. Despite the “freak folk” category, some of his best songs cleave to a rock’n’roll or blues tradition as a listen to ‘Automatic Slim & The Fatboys’ (from ‘Snockgrass’) or ‘Dying Crapshooter’s Blues’ (from 2007’s ‘Ancestral Swamp’) will attest. A gifted artist, he adorned his albums with his paintings and often included comic books and cartoons in the liners featuring his wolf-like characters Boone and Jocko, along with his alter ego Snock (he also went by the names of Snockman, Doc Snock, Hi Fi Snock, Elwood Snock, or simply The Snock).
Of his youthful friends and fellow freak folk originators, Hurley outlasted his Buck County companion Steve Weber (who died in 2020) but both Robin Remaily and Peter Stampfel continue to fly their old freak flag. In the meantime newer acts such as Kassi Valazza continue to introduce his songs to new audiences.
His death was sudden and unexpected, coming just a few days after he performed at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee and then a show in Asheville, North Carolina. Apparently he had a new album in the offing, all mastered and ready for release which we hope will see the light of day.
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