Written by Emily Hilliard

On April Fool’s Day, beloved and iconoclastic musician Michael Hurley—aka Elwood Snock, aka Doc Snock, aka Bad Mr. Mike—passed away at the age of eighty-three after returning home to Oregon from a short tour. As a lifer and folk hero trickster of sorts, I suppose it was a fitting way to go; I’m glad he continued to play music right until the end, but his passing feels like the end of an era for a type of American troubadour who carved out a path outside of the constraints and dilutions of the corporate music industry.

Though Michael Hurley was in Greenwich Village during the height of the folk revival, released over thirty albums and toured continuously since his 1964 Folkways debut First Songs, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary songwriters, he successfully avoided becoming famous in any mainstream sense for the entirety of his career. He preferred to live his life in music and art on his own terms. Michael never stopped playing shows at unusual venues: rug stores, print shop warehouses, dive bars, and Vermont ski resorts all hosted him over the years. The best show I saw him play was at an old German gymnastics club on the banks of the Ohio River. When his records weren’t selling, he supported his music through his visual art: whimsical comics and paintings of interplanetary visitors, suns smiling over technicolor landscapes of striped hills and pie rivers, and a recurring anthropomorphized wolf pair named Boone and Jocko. The cosmology of his visual art cross-pollinated his music and vice versa.

All of this is not to say that Michael wasn’t well known. What I’ve been struck by since his passing is not necessarily how many fans he had—that’s not surprising, especially given the mystique of the “outsider” artist—but how many friends he had. He knew people in every corner of the country who he wrote letters to, played music with, who were partners in crime, or who would show up when he needed a ride to the next gig, a home-cooked burrito, or a comfortable place to crash. To have such a prodigious music career-turned-lifestyle while simultaneously rejecting corporate support meant that he had to rely on these friend networks. Michael knew that, and was good to his people in return, sharing paintings, recordings, or recipes as an expression of his gratitude and friendship.

I count myself one of those people. Michael and I first started corresponding seventeen years ago, when I was interning at Smithsonian Folkways. I had friended him on Myspace (remember, it was 2008), he saw I had a radio show, and he sent me CD-Rs of his latest releases, Sweetkorn and Ancestral Swamp. From there, we became penpals, bonding in particular over our shared love for food—specifically pie. I usually wrote about the pies I made, he usually wrote about the pies he ate. I finally did get to make him one in 2014, after Transfigurations II, the festival Harvest Records hosted outside of Asheville. His garden and apples were also a constant epistolary theme, and the last time I visited Portland in 2023, he suggested we hold a “cider-sipping based and tea tasting party” with my homemade apple pies. He said it was the best apple year he’d seen since he moved to the county.

What I find so unique about Michael’s songwriting was his ability to absorb the full spectrum of American music—rock ’n’ roll, blues, folk, jazz, ballads, you name it—churn it up together, and create new work that drew on all those references. It still felt utterly singular, cosmically timeless, delightfully strange and never precious. In an interview folklorist Fred Ramsey Jr. did with him around the time First Songs was released, Michael, then twenty-two, stated that it was important to him that he “be influenced without imitating.” To my knowledge, the only thing Michael ever imitated, to great effect in a live show, were the animal characters that pepper his songs (see “Old Black Crow”).

Because Michael Hurley didn’t become the voice of a generation or ever have a hit record, his music never had the misfortune of being pegged to a specific era or subjected to the trends of the market. While there was maybe a period in the late 1970s or so when his voice or guitar-playing was at its height, there’s a steadiness across his discography that contributes to that feeling of timelessness. He would revisit certain songs and melodies, revising and modifying and rerecording, carrying over floater verses like in the blues songs he loved.

When he recorded First Songs with Fred Ramsey, I’m sure it was not lost on Michael that he was recording on the same reel-to-reel machine that Ramsey used to record the last session of Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, who Michael then cited as his favorite singer, along with Hank Williams. While that record is somewhat of an outlier in Michael’s catalog—it’s the only album that has a photo of him on the cover, and is a bit more stark and serious than the rest—it makes sense that Michael’s first chapter was as a Folkways recording artist. Both the label and Michael Hurley have stood as examples for me and so many others, proving that a weird, underground, vernacular, non-commercial—or what Michael would have called “snocky”—music scene could exist, there on the margins, for those needing to hear it.