Michael Hurley, a godfather of underground folks, has died : NPR

Michael Hurley didn’t wish to finish his week in Knoxville. The idiosyncratic songwriter and cartoonist had been coming to the East Tennessee metropolis for many years, however his journey there during the last weekend in March for the sprawling music competition Huge Ears had confirmed particularly irritating. A most cancers survivor who had turned 83 three months earlier, he was so sick that he instructed Regina Greene, a longtime confidant who generally helped him ebook exhibits, that he could not carry out a full set.

And but, he did, twice. That Friday, he crammed a church, slicing a gaunt determine as he shuffled onstage and requested another person to plug in his guitar. He moved between conventional covers and winking originals, his voice generally rising for a cappella numbers to provide his fingers a relaxation. On Saturday, the road snaked across the block to see him inside a tiny Scottish pub, the group mere toes away.

In any other case, although, Hurley — a well-known flirt and charismatic storyteller whom folks typically referred to as Snock — largely remained in his resort room. When he had the possibility to depart early on Sunday for a sold-out present on Monday throughout the mountains in Asheville, N.C., the perpetually peripatetic Hurley took it. Possibly that may be higher? Hurley performed for just a few hundred of us that night; on Tuesday he flew house to Oregon, and died that evening.

Born in 1941, a proud native of Pennsylvania’s Bucks County who wrote his first tune at 5, Hurley was solely 22 when he launched his debut, First Songs, on Folkways in 1964. Even then, he felt like some survivor of Previous Bizarre America, some lingering vestige of the famed Harry Smith field set that Folkways had issued a decade earlier, pantomiming the a part of a younger singer. The New York Occasions panned it, however Folkways proprietor Moe Asch gave him an advance to make the second in a studio, anyway. Hurley used the money to pay his payments and by no means spoke to Asch once more. “I used to be at all times very sensible,” he instructed me in 2021, whereas I used to be writing about The Time of the Foxgloves for The New York Occasions. It was the final album he launched throughout his lifetime. When he left Oregon for the East Coast final week, he was ending the paintings for Damaged Properties and Gardens, due this summer time on No Quarter Information.

That playful pragmatism outlined Hurley’s artwork. After a collection of failed label offers, most notably with a Warner imprint owned by good friend and Youngbloods chief Jesse Colin Younger, he launched his personal Bellemeade Phonics within the late ’80s. His lurid and humorous authentic cowl artwork — wolves getting wasted, wolves rowing canoes beneath a smiling solar, wolves cruising quick in traditional vehicles — emblematized the uncanny worlds inside. What sounded at first like folks songs as an alternative supplied a approach to sublimate actuality, to acknowledge laborious occasions and name their bluff with amusing, a moan, some wine, or an odd story the place the unattainable instantly appeared odd. Not less than for me, loving Michael Hurley’s songs meant hoping to maneuver by the world with a smile so wry, amusing so actual, a grace so plain. As Will Oldham, however one member in Hurley’s legion of acolytes, instructed me: “The chorus is, ‘What would Michael Hurley do?'”

I had simply began a really lengthy stroll within the woods early this week when the decision got here that Hurley had gone. I had seen him 5 days earlier than, texting pals who knew of his illnesses a photograph, proof of life. I wallowed a bit as I walked, then, unhappy that somebody who at all times appeared so alive was now lifeless. I placed on a Hurley album at random — a current reissue of Sweetkorn, from 2002. It begins with the tales of a real itinerant’s travails, like crashing the van they referred to as house right into a poplar tree or stepping on a stitching needle that will get lodged of their foot for a month. “Acquired over it / Acquired over it / I had a tough time,” Hurley sings, his voice cracking into crumbs of falsetto. “However I obtained over it.”

I considered him driving throughout the ridge to Asheville, making an attempt to recover from that tough time he’d had in Knoxville. I smiled and saved strolling. Precisely, I believed, what Michael Hurley would do.