An elegant troubadour

Music Row
By Brian Rademaekers

The music that Michael Hurley makes is the kind of stuff that can melt your heart and have you humming when you’re in the meanest of moods.
It’ll leave you singing hours later, repeating the wisdom-soaked and logic-tangled lines that he threads through his creations. It effortlessly imbues peace, and, if you let it, can induce a state of harmony. That’s because his music — some 20 albums across the decades — is rich with a special kind of purity, honesty and earthy realness.
Starting with a Folkways recording in 1965, the Bucks County native has made a career of rambling and wandering, drinking wine and homebrewed beer and singing his own precious breed of deeply American folk and blues.
The 67-year-old nomad has long since wandered from his Pennsylvania haunts, but his stories are full of local gems: dating a waitress from the New Hope Diner, picking apples in Bucks orchards, singing songs in New Hope cafes, camping out in a Lawrenceville house.
He is often known for his songs that are populated by hobo hipster wolves and his alternate "Snock" personality, characters that he has drawn on and spoke of since childhood. But Hurley also sings of tragedy and despair, of love and gambling and sitting around a fire.
Hurley made his most recent appearance on the fresh Gnomonsong label with his 2007 release, Ancestral Swamp.
Artistically nurtured by Vetiver’s Andy Cabic and Devendra Banhart, Ancestral Swamp’s appearance on Gnomonsong marks a new era of appreciation for Hurley among the pleasantly flourishing cadre of new folk experimentalists and beyond.
Locally, the Espers clan paid homage to the old Philly rambler with a cover of his 1965 recording, Blue Mountain, on Weed Tree; Cat Power also took on his haunting The Werewolf, 1971’s Swee dee dee and The Devil’s Daughter, and his songs twice appeared in the hit HBO series Deadwood.
Hurley’s latest emergence is just one of many for a guy who started out recording his first tracks on the same reel-to-reel machine that whirled in Leadbelly’s Last Sessions.
Fittingly, Hurley seems to be an extension of the generation of American musicians that included Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. His songs, most often sparse recordings with occasional accompaniment, tell simple stories of humanity rife with humor and color, all wrapped in warm harmonies.
Hurley’s work, though, also carries all the complexity and modern strangeness that have sprouted across the four decades of his career. But as interesting as the background details maybe, his music stands wonderfully on its own. Last year’s album is, for all its beauty, a fairly dark collection of songs, with a heavy blues dose weighing on the affair.
There are a few exceptions. The opener, Knockcando, has us sitting around a blue-flame fire of crackling pine wood, sipping from a stiff cup of "no-can-do"; other carefree auras can be found on tracks like El Dorado and the slightly nonsensical Appalachian warmness of When I Get Back Home.
Hurley’s Ancestral Swamp, however, also has lots of gloomy numbers — Dying Crapshooters Blues, Lonesome Graveyard, and 1st Precinct Blues among them.
Still, his vocals and crafty wordplay combine with his proclivity for high-pitched warbling to give every song a shine that keeps the listener buoyant even through those dark passages.
In comparison, it will always be hard to match the blissful, harmonious heights of his classic 1971 album Armchair Boogie, where a young Hurley watches kites fly over Washington Square from the top of a "fleabag flat" and makes this observation:
I can see by the way you
Wash them clothes,
Your cookin’ must be fine
A simple sentiment, yes, but much of Hurley’s beauty is rooted in an innocence that seems simple on the surface, only to unravel into more complexity as the songs roll onward.
Looking at him these days, with his leathery, wind-worn face, shocks of silvery white hair and his faraway eyes, one might think the wisdom of his songs comes from those years of wandering and pondering. There is, no doubt, some of that in his music.
But a listen to his works from more than 40 years ago illuminates a being who has long known some sort of secret, a backdoor way to figure out the mysteries in life and still come out smiling.
It’s that charm that makes his songs the treasures they are. ••

Check it out . . .
Who: Michael Hurley
What: Bucks County native and Outsider folk legend
Where: Upstairs at the World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St.
When: Tuesday, March 27, at 8 p.m. Hurley opens for Ida. Tickets are $15 at the door.