Michael Hurley, an underground folk icon who spent some of his most productive years in Vermont, died last week. He was 83.
According to multiple obituaries, Hurley, a cancer survivor, was feeling ill while touring in Tennessee and died shortly after returning to his home state of Oregon. No official cause of death has been publicized.
“It is with a resounding sadness that the Hurley family announces the recent sudden passing of the inimitable Michael Hurley,” his family wrote in a statement. “The ‘Godfather of freak folk’ was for a prolific half-century the purveyor of an eccentric genius and compassionate wit. He alone was Snock. There is no other. Friends, family, and the music community deeply mourn his loss.”
Known among friends and acolytes as “Snock,” Hurley failed to receive mainstream recognition for most of his career but developed an underground following for his idiosyncratic brand of folk, which often blended cartoonish imagery and earnest, almost childlike sentiment.
Like the original artwork adorning his record covers, Hurley’s songs are surrealistic romps through an unrivaled imagination, featuring pork chops, wine jugs, angry crows, demonic hogs, oyster molecules and anthropomorphized wolves.
He lived in Vermont for much of the ‘70s and ‘80s, a period during which he released some of his most beloved albums, including the 1976 cult classic Have Moicy!, which longtime Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau named a top 10 album of the decade.
“This is where it really all came together for him,” said Robert Iwaskiewicz, of East Fairfield, Hurley’s friend and collaborator for much of his time in Vermont. “He mentioned a number of times while he was last here that he had really wanted to come back because he felt that this was his real home.”
Born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1941, Hurley began to create at an early age, drawing comics in class and picking up a variety of instruments at home.
His debut album, First Songs, was released on the iconic label Folkways Records in 1964, when Hurley was just 22. On it, Hurley treated folk songs as a pliable form, his irregular tempo and gothic characters sometimes sprawling across tracks that stretch seven minutes.
Hurley recorded the album with Fred Ramsey Jr., a jazz scholar and record producer who’d discovered the young musician walking the roads of Pennsylvania with his guitar. At the time, the budding songwriter was bouncing between Bucks County and Greenwich Village, the epicenter of the 1960s folk revival.
On his debut, Hurley recorded what would become a fan favorite, “The Werewolf Song,” a story of a misunderstood cryptid resigned to society’s fringe. “For the werewolf have pity, not fear, and not hate / Because the werewolf might be someone that you’ve known of late,” Hurley wails.
Hurley’s youthful musical influences included a long line of country and blues greats like Lead Belly, Hank Williams, Blind Willie McTell and Blind Lemon Jefferson, he said in an interview in spring 2024 for a profile in County Highways magazine.
“I discovered Lead Belly’s music and I liked to play the blues,” he said in that interview. “I keep thinking about Lead Belly. He was sort of a giant to me.”
Folkways owner Moe Asch offered Hurley an advance to cut his second record, but the musician famously took the money and hit the road instead. For a while, he bounced around the country before ending up in the Boston area. Eventually, he recorded two albums on the Warner Brothers imprint Raccoon, started by his childhood friend Jesse Colin Young of Youngbloods fame.
In the early ’70s, Hurley relocated to Vermont after a few of his siblings moved to the area, joining the state’s burgeoning folk movement.
He spent much of the next two decades roaming, writing music and playing at pubs and ski lodges in the state with his bands The Redbirds and Automatic Slim & the Fatboys.
“In those days when we played, people never would have guessed that it would have come to this,” Iwaskiewicz said, referencing Hurley’s more recent reception. “Only a few of us recognized way back then the value — really the unique, classical, lasting-forever incredible value — of Michael’s music and his poetry.”
To pay the bills, Hurley did manual labor at local farms and factories, clearing rocks from fields and helping with the wool-dying process, among other odd jobs, Hurley said in 2024. He recalled his itinerant lifestyle in Vermont, spent in places as various as Cabot, Royalton and East Fairfield, where he developed relationships with the older generations of Vermonters who kept him employed.
“The ones you’d get to know wanted to know you,” Hurley said. “They appreciate you being there.”
Meanwhile, Hurley — working with Iwaskiewicz and his other bandmates — was releasing the records that would establish his cult reputation in the underground folk scene, including Long Journey, Snockgrass and Have Moicy!
The latter became Hurley’s one midcareer moment of critical acclaim.
A collaboration with Peter Stampfel, of Holy Modal Rounders fame, and Jeffrey Frederick & the Clamtones, a Vermont folk-rock band, the record showcased the combination slacker wisdom and slapstick humor that later came to define Hurley’s output.
“It’s one of the great and still underrated music albums of my entire era,” Christgau, one of the country’s preeminent rock critics, said in a brief interview Monday. “It’s a work of genius, that record.”
After leaving Vermont in the mid-’80s, Hurley decamped south and west, self-releasing new material and settling down in Oregon, where he made a home in later life.
As he aged, Hurley’s following only grew, and he toured both domestically and abroad.
In the early 2000s, a new generation of musicians looked to him as a guiding light, and he attracted a cadre of acolytes among exponents of what has since been christened the “freak folk” movement. Acts as varied as Lucinda Williams, Yo La Tengo and Big Thief have all counted themselves as fans.
Hurley, meanwhile, continued to tour into his eighties, releasing new music in 2021. Despite his newfound following, he never changed his ways. He played low-key gigs, made music on his own time, tinkered with old cars in his driveway. And periodically, he paid visits to Vermont to play small shows and see old friends.
“All of these people loved his music,” said Michele Bessett, of East Fairfield, Hurley’s one-time manager during his Vermont period. “It was fun, it was raucous, it was image-ridden, it was creative beyond imagination.”
