Michael Hurley, the godfather of freak folk, died in April. Now we have his last, posthumous album, which was released in September and offers a final occasion to look back at his contributions, always arriving slightly aslant, to folk music history. An outsider artist but no museum-room oddity, Hurley was an authentic American avant-gardist, like Emily Dickinson or Ornette Coleman. When I saw him at the Brooklyn Folk Festival last November he walked onstage to a hero’s welcome. The show was in a great dark church and those of us who didn’t arrive in time to fill the pews found space on the floor, sitting at his feet. Skeletal, serious, with a handkerchief around his neck and a pipefitter hat shading his eyes, Hurley sang out in a tremulous voice. A few times in the set he paused for a moment—Had he forgotten the words? I wondered—but only to summon some invisible inner current. He was funny, he was grim. On one song, Snock, as many called him, resembled a children’s entertainer, doing an a cappella impersonation of an owl with utter frankness. On another, “The End of the Road,” a wry confrontation with final things, he seemed to be chilly elegizing himself: “They’re chasing’ the fox and they’re runnin’ him ragged and he knows he gone wrong somewhere.” He was old, but the music was electric and his fans seemed to be younger than ever. Next to me a mother sat with her toddler, one generation initiating the next into the rites of Hurleana.

Hurley began his career as a serious young denizen of the Village at the height of the folk revival, recording a debut album for the venerable Smithsonian Folkways label in 1964. Already much of the future Hurley is here, winking out at us surreally. The love for food and drink. The werewolf from “The Werewolf Song,” which was to become one his special personae. His take on Captain Kidd, a privateer popular as a subject for pirate narratives, has the Scotsman locking himself in a rocket ship and taking an interplanetary trip. And yet the Hurley on First Songs still has not really distinguished himself from his Greenwich peers. He has absorbed the blues moods and attitudes that floated everywhere in the air without yet figuring out how to make use of them in his singular way. These were the years when every up-and-coming folkster styled himself a hobo and a rambler, and spent his spare time trying to figure out how Mississippi John Hurt finger-picked the guitar. The guitar-playing on First Songs tends to be heavy: strummy-chuggy, I want to say. Later it gets lither, with pirouetting little chromatic motions here and there. Look at the cover and sleeve photographs of Hurley on the album and you get the same impression. This solemn youth—that’s Snock?

Hurley left New York right after this debut and emerged seven years later on Armchair Boogie (1971), one of his best records, as a figure weirder, deeper, pervier, lovelier. Beneath familiar folk and blues chord progressions, he increasingly found a way to present a cryptic symbology of images cribbed from the country’s popular culture, an upside-down, Looney Tunes universe populated by songs that could be as simple and confounding as a Mother Goose rhyme. The tunes might be straightforward love songs or they might come off as riddles or half-invented slang. “The Hog of the Forsaken,” goes one of his most perplexing and catchy tunes, “Got no reason to cry / He got to chew the angels / Fallen from on high / He ain’t waitin’ for no answer / Bakin’ woeful pie / Pie of eyesight, pie blue-black / Whoa that pie, the pie of bye-n-bye.”

From the ’70s until his death this year, Hurley attested to the creative virtues of self-marginalization. He forewent cross-country tours and affiliation with major record labels, instead producing from his home in Vermont and then Oregon a stream of inimitable, cheaply recorded albums, instantly recognizable by their covers graced by his signature twin cartoon wolves, Boone and Jocko. In his chosen obscurity, he was a world-class vagrant, a sort of professional layabout—“Just a tramp, call me what you like,” as he sang it—who was paradoxically never less than highly productive. Thus the “freak” label, which he always rejected, had some truth: it could designate both a professional route away from personal ambition and also a persona to be taken up and inhabited. Self-consciously, he projected himself into a series of such personae: Snock, Jocko, the Werewolf, Light Green Fellow, Blue Navigator, Ol’ Ratface, Mr. Whiskerwits. (“I’m what they call a CC: a colorful character,” he remarked in one tune.) Which of these figures was a real-life nickname and which a more purely fictive thing could be hard to tell and added to the allure. What the personae shared was a sense of delinquency. They were idlers, one and all, drinkers, ramblers, sometimes womanizers. Bad at getting work, worse at keeping it. Lazy but also restless.

The real-life Hurley rotated prolifically through odd jobs. In Cambridge, he sold hot pretzels from a cart that featured his paintings of Boone and Jocko. He served as a life model for art classes, put together slats for venetian blinds, worked as a hospital janitor, made kielbasa sausages at a grocery store until he was “fired for being weird.” He did enjoy one job—wheeling around carts of cookie dough. “I liked a job like that,” he said in a 2013 magazine profile. “Where you could kind of space out all day. That one I kept for a long time.” In 1966, he moved to Vermont for two decades, where he lived in some thirty-five different towns. He stayed in vacant farmhouses, a teepee, anywhere that didn’t charge rent.

Like any good tramp, Hurley was concerned with the greatest of all practicalities—food and where to get it—and had a philosophy of the belly. How many other American songwriters have made food the proper subject of their best songs? Have idolized it so unashamedly? From the first, he wanted to enjoy food and drink in excess. (On tea: “I like six cups, not one or two.”) He wanted it religiously (“I heard the voice of a pork chop say ‘Come unto me and rest,’” he sang, in the most compelling artistic representation of a pork chop since John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens). And he wanted to eat it all with friends. On “You Got to Find Me,” he boasts of having cooked beef stew for forty people. Food in his songs appeared in all its weightiness and doughiness, stuff that plumps the stomach and clogs the arteries. (“Cookin’ up tortillas, so much fun, when you got a bowl of beans / . . . We fill up our guts, then we turn it into shit, then we get rid of it.”) It can make the listener think of Jan Steen’s Dutch scenes of peasant merriment. Or of Sancho Panza. Or, closer to home, of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. We are near an old strain of folk utopianism, one that depicts the afterlife as a place with towers of food rising to the heavens. One of the first songs Hurley came up with was a sort of mantra he and his brother would chant aloud as children: “There’s such a thing as doughnuts / In the wide, wide world / Doughnuts! Doughnuts!”

At the same time, Hurley and his personae often dwelt in loneliness. He preserved folk’s now mostly disappeared connection to the blues, both by using its musical structures and thematizing it explicitly in his lyrics. “I’m Reconciled to the Blues,” goes one song. “Why should I live the blues?” goes another. If the results were sometimes predictable, they could also be moving. One of his most beloved personae, the werewolf, is a sort of blues figure—a monster, and at the same time a pitiable, afflicted thing, suffering under a curse or illness. (“Once I saw him in the moonlight / When the bats were a-flying / All alone I saw the werewolf and / The werewolf was crying.”) Once introduced, the werewolf proved an inescapable archetype, creeping through Hurley’s tunes and leaping out in unexpected places. In “Eyes Eyes,” one of Hurley’s most haunting and surreal compositions, one moment Marilyn Monroe is pointing her toe and the next the wolf has suddenly appeared: “The werewolf cries and everybody hides / He won’t be scared when he dies / Look in his eyes.”

By the 1990s, Hurley had become a favorite among a rising generation of independent musicians. Cat Power made two excellent covers of Snock tunes. Devendra Banhart turned younger listeners onto Hurley by producing an album of his. I learned of him through an interview with Kurt Vile. Did his music suffer from this attention? No, the albums continued to emerge at the same pace (“There’s no dignity in haste,” he sings on one of his last tunes), now increasingly accompanied by younger musicians sensitively enriching his sound. Ida con Snock (2009), an album where he is joined by the band Ida, is as beautiful as any of the best of the early work.

In the last twenty years of his life, Hurley lived in Astoria, Oregon. His last two albums settle into a familiar sound. The Time of the Foxgloves (2021), named for the blooming season of foxglove flowers in Oregon in July, has the air of an impromptu jam of friends playing American folk tunes: you can hear Hurley’s guitar, a prominent stand-up bass from Luke Ydstie, banjo and vocals from Kati Clayborn. Somewhere, emerging from the corner of the room, comes a stray baritone clarinet or a saxophone, recalling the improvised polyphony of a New Orleans jazz band. Distinctly, too, come the twinkling of bells, as on the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning.” On “Jacob’s Ladder,” the singer Josphine Foster seems to have accidentally walked into this midnight gathering and added her distinctive voice to the affair.

These fellow travelers accompany Hurley onto his final album, Broken Homes and Garden, out last month. There’s a sense on the record’s best songs of the incipience of death. But it is death regarded mildly, with acceptance and even amusement. Death not confronted in frightened solitude but in the society of friends. “Everybody prayin’, everybody sayin’, nobody wanna die. / By and by, you have to give it a try,” Hurley instructs on ”Indian Chiefs and Hula Girls.” Then, turning to address the Reaper himself: “Come and take . . . take me home.” And “I’ll Walk With You,” co-written by Sarah Illingworth: “I’ll walk with you till the morning slows me down. I’ll walk with you till it’s over, my friend. / . . . Keep on rolling and I’ll find you ‘round the bend. / June, June, sweet June, and July. / Juniper berry and rye.” What remains on Broken Homes, in the face of death, is the sweetness of companionship, and good weather and food.

The mood of these last two albums, with their loose, amiable ensembles, reminds me of a time early in the pandemic when I was living at my parents’ home in Maryland. Our neighbors, inveterate folkies, hosted long jam sessions on their front porch on Friday mornings. I would sometimes wake up to the sound of voices and instruments emanating upwards through the foliage between our houses. A couple times I joined. One morning, I was startled awake by a long clear honking noise. I peered out of my window to find a man on the sidewalk below, with bagpipes on his chest, making a stately advance in the direction of my neighbor’s house. Of course, I thought. On that porch he would join people I had known for as long as I could remember: the stand-up bass player who wore her dark curly locks down to her waist. And the tall man with wispy white hair and a bandana whom I’d never met but seem to recollect from childhood or a dream. It is easy to imagine Hurley among that group now, idling out the long day with music before heading in to make a great pot of chili.

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