To Live Is To Die

My tribute to Michael Hurley

A few months back, my son introduced me to an artist from Portland. Well he’s not from Portland he is actually from Pennsylvania. I am a music person, however, our son sometimes picks up things from Germany that I never see. He told me of an artist named Michael Hurley who’s playing in Portland?

We want to see Michael and a little pub in Portland a few weeks later. It was well into his 80s and those gathered to hear him were well into their 20s or 30s. It was a great evening and an unusual mix of people. I listen to Michael Hurley‘s music often and actually just ordered the two most recent albums..

Well, I found out he died this past weekend ironically on April fools Day.

Excerpt from an NPR article

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.

Born in 1941, a proud native of Pennsylvania’s Bucks County who wrote his first song at 5, Hurley was only 22 when he released his debut, First Songs, on Folkways in 1964. Even then, he felt like some survivor of Old Weird America, some lingering vestige of the famed Harry Smith box set that Folkways had issued a decade earlier, pantomiming the part of a young singer. The New York Times panned it, but Folkways owner Moe Asch gave him an advance to make the second one in a studio, anyway. Hurley used the cash to pay his bills and never spoke to Asch again. “I was always very practical,” he told me in 2021, while I was writing about The Time of the Foxgloves for The New York Times. It was the last album he released during his lifetime. When he left Oregon for the East Coast last week, he was finishing the artwork for Broken Homes and Gardens, due this summer on No Quarter Records.

I do love his music and do listen to it often. But what I love the most about him, even though that may seem a bit hyperbolic, is I see a lot of me in him? I am no musician however I adore his artwork. His albums are fun to listen to. Do you remember when eating cereal as a kid and reading the cereal box. His albums are that way you can just get lost in the artwork upon listening to the music.