His long journey was restless, unscripted and unbound.

Michael Hurley died last week, more than 60 years after his remarkable debut album for Folkways, First Songs, hit the world. In those intervening years, Hurley was an engine of creativity, often living hand to mouth, playing odd gigs, selling his comic-inspired wolf paintings, making records and tapes, and touring. At various points he lived in a teepee, sold pretzels, painted houses, cleaned bars, made slats for Venetian blinds, and pushed carts of dough in a cookie factory. Through it all, he recorded porch songs.

The story of his final few days was captured in a beautiful NPR tribute, which opens with a scene at the Big Ears festival in Knoxville. Hurley, wrote Grayson Haver Currin, “was so sick that he told Regina Greene, a longtime confidant who sometimes helped him book shows, that he couldn’t perform a full set.”

O My Stars

Currin continued:

“That Friday, he filled a church, cutting a gaunt figure as he shuffled onstage and asked someone else to plug in his guitar. He moved between traditional covers and winking originals, his voice sometimes rising for a cappella numbers to give his fingers a rest. On Saturday, the line snaked around the block to see him inside a tiny Scottish pub, the crowd mere feet away.

“Otherwise, though, Hurley — a famous flirt and charismatic storyteller whom people often called Snock — mostly remained in his hotel room. When he had the chance to leave early on Sunday for a sold-out show on Monday across the mountains in Asheville, N.C., the forever peripatetic Hurley took it. Maybe that would be better? Hurley played for a few hundred folks that evening; on Tuesday he flew home to Oregon, and died that night.”

Currin noted a refrain that Will Oldham used to make decisions: “What would Michael Hurley do?”

The Werewolf

One of the best primers on Hurley is an 11,000-word overview written by Byron Coley for Arthur Magazine. The piece is a deep dive into the musician’s life and work, and it’s brilliant, especially this passage about Hurley’s 1972 album Armchair Boogie:

Young decided to record the album in Hurley’s bedroom, which was equipped with a piano. Michael was working as a janitor at the Paris Cinema at the time. And Young would show up when he could to record the album that would become Armchair Boogie.

“The sessions were great,” Hurley says. “Michael Kane played bass on it ‘cause he had the apartment across the hall from me, and we both brewed a lot of beer. And I brought in my old pal Robin Remaily.”

Armchair Boogie is a perfect album, a lo-fi classic featuring the haunting, truly creepy “Light Green Fellow,” the lovely, if anachronistic, song “Sweedeedeee,” which Cat Power covered. She also covered
“The Werewolf. “Open Up” is an ode to sex, which he calls “free falling through the abyss,” in which he requesting that a lover “take me to the tit of the heavenly body.” Album-closer “Penguins” is an instrumental, kind of. The horn lines are Hurley mimicking the sound of a muted trumpet with his lips.

Eyes, Eyes

Here are the lyrics to one of his most haunting songs, “Eyes, Eyes.”

Protein monster ate a sack of poison sugar
Crawling out of the barn to the weeds to die
Rolling his eyes, eyes, eyes eyes
Mama Molasses broke my glasses
Then the moon came up and we wiggled our asses
She got red eyes, eyes
The werewolf rides and everybody hides
He won’t be scared when he dies
Look in his eyes, eyes
Marilyn Monroe pointed her toe
Crawling out of the pool from the waters so cold
Camera flashes flashing back from her eyes, eyes
Smoky the Bear standing there
In front of the woods all black and bare
Tears in his eyes, eyes
She calls me a bum
Sleeping through the day
There was nothing i wanted to say
I closed my eyes, eyes.

Hog of the Forsaken

Hurley’s best known song is perhaps Hog of the Forsaken, made so by its appearance as the opening song for the HBO series Deadwood.

Driving Wheel

“Driving Wheel,” a song about depression, is one of Hurley’s most enduring works. Here’s Hurley telling Coley about a gig after Hurley teamed with the Holy Modal Rounders and others to make the album it’s from, Have Moicy, and the Hurley drawn cover image below.

We did a gig up there and it’s kinda depicted on the cover of Have Moicy. My brother’s girlfriend heaved a beer across the room at that gig. It hit a fiddle that was leaning against an amplifier and I did a drawing of that. It broke the fiddle. So it was Froggy’s idea—that painting of Thora chucking this beer. Froggy was looking at my drawings and says, ‘You don’t have it right. You gotta get the dimensions of the beer right. Bring that beer up, make it bigger. Make it so you can see that she threw it and so that you can see what it’s gonna hit.’ No one sees that the fiddle was doomed, but that was the story. Paul Presti came up and played that show. That was when I first met him. The Unholies, Jefferey Fredericks, and my band were all there. I forget what the hell we were doing, but we put on a show. And my brother’s girlfriend was disgruntled. She was always doing things like that.

Hurley’s legacy is a testament to restless creativity and a life spent chasing songs down back roads and across decades. His music thrived on the crooked and the ramshackle, capturing oddball poetry and unvarnished truths with a gruff, weathered grace. Those who’ve never gone deep into his catalog have a wealth of brilliant, peculiar songs to look forward to