Michael Hurley, the outsider people artist and singer-songwriter who got here up within the Greenwich Village people scene within the Sixties and continued making music into the current day, has died at residence in Astoria, Oregon, his household revealed in an announcement. “The ‘Godfather of freak people’ was for a prolific half-century the purveyor of an eccentric genius and compassionate wit. He alone was Snock. There isn’t any different,” it reads. Hurley was 83.
For over 60 years, Hurley wrote and recorded unique songs that parse by bluegrass, freak-folk, and blues with an ear for eccentric concepts and stripped-back moments. Although his music and album paintings was playful—a wolf devours whoopie pies at a diner on the duvet of 1994’s Wolfways, and tune titles vary from “You’re a Canine; Don’t Discuss to Me ” to “What Made My Hamburger Disappear?”—Hurley discovered a approach to faucet into the intense elements of life concurrently, utilizing minute particulars and sweeping reflections to encourage listeners to take a step again and admirer the larger image of life earlier than them.
Born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a number of days earlier than Christmas in 1941, Hurley began taking part in music and writing his personal songs as a preteen. Summers have been spent listening to Fat Waller and Jelly Roll Morton, and making up easy songs throughout roadtrips together with his household. He dropped out of highschool to design fanzines, play music, and hitchhike with a guitar slung over his again. It was on a kind of wandering routes that he was picked up by Fred Ramsey, a folklorist who lived up the street and ended up producing his debut. After recovering from a multi-year-long battle with mononucleosis, a 22-year-old Hurley lastly recorded his debut album, the aptly titled First Songs, in 1963 for Folkways, the famed label residence to Woody Guthrie and Harry Smith’s Anthology of American People Music.
Hurley expanded his expertise past singing and taking part in guitar to additionally embody fiddle and banjo, and was an energetic illustrator as effectively, portray and drawing lots of the artworks that comprised his album covers. When his childhood pal and future Youngbloods singer Jesse Colin Younger selected to champion his work, Hurley’s music started to unfold by phrase of mouth – partially due to Younger releasing his subsequent two albums, 1971’s Armchair Boogie and 1972’s Hello Fi Snock Uptown, on his Warner Bros. imprint Raccoon.
After signing a contract with Rounder, Hurley launched Have Moicy! in 1975 and the album garnered each underground fanfare and significant acclaim, resulting in the discharge of two extra LPs on the label: 1976’s Lengthy Journey and 1980’s Snockgrass. As he continued to churn out dozens of data, Hurley additionally garned the admiration of his youthful friends, together with Yo La Tengo, Cat Energy, Lucinda Williams, Vic Chesnutt, and Calexico, amongst others.
