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

Michael Hurley didn’t need 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 over the past weekend in March for the sprawling music pageant Massive Ears had confirmed particularly irritating. A most cancers survivor who had turned 83 three months earlier, he was so sick that he advised Regina Greene, a longtime confidant who typically helped him guide reveals, that he could not carry out a full set.

And but, he did, twice. That Friday, he crammed a church, reducing 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 typically rising for a cappella numbers to offer his fingers a relaxation. On Saturday, the road snaked across the block to see him inside a tiny Scottish pub, the group mere ft away.

In any other case, although, Hurley — a well-known flirt and charismatic storyteller whom folks typically known as Snock — principally remained in his lodge 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 eternally peripatetic Hurley took it. Possibly that will be higher? Hurley performed for just a few hundred people that night; on Tuesday he flew residence 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 advised 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 art work for Damaged Houses and Gardens, due this summer time on No Quarter Data.

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 unique cowl artwork — wolves getting wasted, wolves rowing canoes beneath a smiling solar, wolves cruising quick in basic vehicles — emblematized the uncanny worlds inside. What sounded at first like folks songs as a substitute provided a strategy to sublimate actuality, to acknowledge arduous occasions and name their bluff with amusing, a moan, some wine, or an odd story the place the unimaginable all of the sudden appeared atypical. No less than for me, loving Michael Hurley’s songs meant hoping to maneuver via 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, advised 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 associates who knew of his illnesses a photograph, proof of life. I wallowed a little bit as I walked, then, unhappy that somebody who at all times appeared so alive was now useless. I placed on a Hurley album at random — a latest reissue of Sweetkorn, from 2002. It begins with the tales of a real itinerant’s travails, like crashing the van they known as residence 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 acquired over it.”

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