As many of you know, Michael Hurley died in April last year at the age of 83. Soon after, No Quarter released his final studio album, Broken Homes and Gardens. In his review of that album, Thomas Blake painted a beautiful portrait of the godfather of freak folk, describing him as “an outsider’s outsider, an essentially itinerant worker whose work was mining the raw product of his unique mind and presenting it as entertainment. And he was good at it. He seemed to pluck songs from the air like a Victorian urchin stealing apples.” He later adds: “If he had plans to slow down or to tie up any creative loose ends, there is no evidence of that in these songs. They show Hurley in his essential form: digressive, surreal, jokey, ultimately moving. A folk prankster with a poet’s soul.”
Across his thirty-odd album legacy, that title of an “outsider’s outsider” and “a poet’s soul” carries extra weight when you consider that his debut studio album, First Songs, was released in 1964 by Smithsonian Folkways when Hurley was just 22 years old.
I’ve been collecting Hurley’s work on vinyl for a long time, so today’s news that Smithsonian Folkways will reissue First Songs as a vinyl LP on November 6th is music to my ears. GRAMMY-nominated engineer Mike Monseur (The Seldom Scene, The War & Treaty, Wynonna Judd) painstakingly remastered the LP reissue, which will be issued on Folkways’ iconic original black gatefold LP.
To mark the occasion, Folkways have shared the official music video for “The Werewolf Song,” animated by Hurley’s friend Drew Christie who also provides some insight into its creation below.
Talking about its creation, Christie shared: “When I first heard ‘The Werewolf Song,’ it inspired so many visual ideas in me. I would just drive in my car listening to it on repeat, letting ideas and images flow to me through the music. At the time I was working mainly in charcoal, and I liked how immediate and raw the material was and how it didn’t allow you to get bogged down in details. Michael’s music is much the same way: very raw and direct and honest and not worried about perfection and precision. I animated the song quickly, frame by frame, on newsprint on an old door table with glass in the center. A lamp was under the glass part of the door, and I shot the film with the lamp illuminating it from below.
When I finished the animation, I showed it to Michael down in Astoria, and he loved it right away. He said, ‘That’s always how I pictured him moving and stepping! You got it!’ He loved it so much he started showing it to everyone he would meet for a while.
‘First Songs’ is a truly special record and statement of a young artist who was wise beyond his years and had something truly unique to sing. It seems to come from another dimension or realm. Whenever people ask who I think is the most original artist or just a favorite, I always say ‘Michael Hurley.’ And then they always say ‘Who?!’ and that’s part of the reason why Michael is so special. His music is so undeniably amazing, and yet he tried with all his might to avoid fame and all its trappings. And he was successful in that. He was a true mystic and his legend will only grow with time.”
The accompanying press announcement shares how, after leaving Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where Hurley was recovering for six months from hepatitis, mononucleosis, and early traces of tuberculosis from a bohemian life in Greenwich Village, he began renting a small stone house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Not far away lived Frederic Ramsey Jr., who recorded First Songs in his own New Jersey home—eschewing a professional recording studio at Hurley’s request, and kicking off Hurley’s lifelong practice of crafting lo-fi (a term he claimed to have invented) homemade recordings. Ramsey used the same reel-to-reel tape machine to record Hurley that he had used in 1948 for what became Lead Belly’s Last Sessions (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings). The vinyl LP reissue includes the original liner notes by Ramsey.
Order via: Smithsonian Folkways | Bandcamp