Michael Hurley’s music is the sound of vagabond America. By the time he was seeking his fortune in the late 1950s, the musical tradition that spoke to Dust Bowl refugees and boxcar fugitives had hardened into a style that would furnish a generation of wayfarers, thumbing rides on the interstate, with the trappings of romantic myth. And while in years to come, stars like Bob Dylan and Tom Waits would wear these trappings at their convenience, in Hurley the archetype of the traveler seemed to find its authentic skin. With his passing, one of the last living connections to this tradition has been severed. What remains are dozens of recordings, a following at its peak, and a movement of younger musicians who look to the man they call Elwood Snock as the genuine article.

Hurley was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1941. His father was a producer of musical theatre, and a childhood pursuing the entertainment business to Florida, and California, and back planted the seed for a life as a troubadour in motion.

A hitchhiker and a high school dropout, Hurley made a grand tour of the East Coast folk scene in the early 60s, playing in a Greenwich Village trio with future members of The Holy Modal Rounders, passing out his mimeographed zine The Morning Tea in Cambridge, and gigging at coffee shops (among other odd jobs) in Philadelphia – along with a busker’s detours to New Orleans and Mexico, and six months on a tuberculosis ward in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital.

In 1964, he released his debut album, First Songs, on Folkways Records. The perspective on the originals here, recorded when he was just 22, is already fully formed: roughhewn acoustic guitar with touches of fiddle, and a narrator with reedy self-possession musing on life’s pleasures and absurdities – wine, women, open roads, railroads, and tea. First Songs also includes what is still perhaps his signature, “The Werewolf Song”, a murder ballad with a folk horror twist that has since been covered by Cat Power, Peter Stampfel, and Violent Femmes.

In the years to come, the wolf – itinerant, alternately ravenous and fun loving, pack-like and lonesome – would become Hurley’s avatar. In his zines, paintings, and the covers of just about every album since his much delayed follow up, 1971’s Armchair Boogie, Hurley’s comic drawings of the wolves Boone and the sunglasses wearing Jocko are a faithful constant. Visual art was second only to music for Hurley, and while these wolves share an obvious kinship with the underground comix likes of R Crumb, their reproducible simplicity calls to mind the railcar graffiti that was a shorthand among outlaws and free-riders for much of the 20th century.

Throughout the decades that followed, Hurley lived as something of a musical outlaw, little known but touring and recording steadily with the help of admiring friends like the Rounders and fellow Bucks County native Jesse Colin Young. One commercial high watermark was 1976’s Have Moicy!, a collaboration with the Rounders (in Unholy mode) as well as Jeffrey Frederick, that featured Hurley’s farcical “Slurf Song”. A paean to a bottomless appetite for perch, potatoes and beans, it makes a pitstop for an insight on the way of all food, and thus all life: “We fill up our guts/Then we turn it into shit/Then we get rid of it.”

This unpretentious verve for comedy and tragedy as beads on a single thread undoubtedly sustained him through the long, lean 80s and 90s, which found most of Hurley’s releases issued through his own Bellemeade Phonics label. He claims that his 1988 album Land Of Lo-Fi & Redbirds coined the phrase lo-fi – a joke about the professionalism of his recording that, nevertheless, would come to stand for a whole bootstrapped bespoke ethos of which he was already a paragon.

From an outpost in rural Vermont, he issued discs, cassettes, and even eight-track tapes, recorded on what equipment he could find with what musicians he could wrangle. On these records, new songs intermingle with covers and refurbished originals. “There is a routine,” he said of his eclectic creative process in an interview in The New York Times in 2021, promoting his last album, The Time Of The Foxgloves, “but you pull up the blanket and shake off the dust. It’s an exercise in possibilities.” Each album plays like a prospective debut, or simply another visit on a long, looping journey – strumming, swaying campfire rambles like “You’ll Never Go To Heaven” that stray unassumingly into visionary splendour, or “I Paint A Design”, where he declares the power to paint a picture of a broken heart.

With the dawn of the internet, these reservoirs of relatively unheard material would be tapped for new life. The creaky cartoon hymn “Hog Of The Forsaken” assumed a place of prominence in the soundtrack to HBO’s cult period drama Deadwood. Soulful and silly, now sporting the snow white moustache of a lifer, Hurley appeared to the nascent national ‘freak folk’ scene as proof of concept made flesh – never a sellout and now something of a late-breaking success. Ancestral Swamp from 2007 and 2009’s Ida Con Snock were released by Devandra Banhart and Andy Cabic’s Gnomonsong label; the latter invited Hurley to play on a version of his own “Blue Driver”, and a couple of other tracks on Vetiver’s admiring 2008 covers album Thing Of The Past. Long features by Byron Coley in The Wire 289 in 2008, and in Arthur Magazine in 2013, helped bring new fans up to speed. Subsequent releases from the taste making archival label Mississippi Records in Portland overlapped with his relocation to coastal Oregon, his base of operations for the expanding tour calendar that characterised the final decade of his life.

I first encountered the music of Michael Hurley in 2013 in Big Sur. He was playing the Woodsist Festival, in one of those sun dappled redwood groves along the California coast one feels reluctant to disturb with a sound of any kind. And yet as his set unfurled (including his jeremiad against the erstwhile agro-glomerate Monsanto), this slight, skinny figure – looking every inch the gyppo logger in work shirt and painter’s cap – seemed to find his own constancy of spirit amplified and refracted by the idyllic surroundings. More than a decade later, this spirit was still drawing audiences to its flame. Reports are that, despite his fatigue, the 83 year old cancer survivor took the stage for two sets at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival late last month, and finished off his swing in Ashville, North Carolina with the sold out show that would prove to be his last. From a distance, such stubborn commitment to the road seems reckless. But for a man so hungry for what was best in life, and hungrier still to share it with others, perhaps the only reckless thing would have been not to share it all to the very last. His final album, Broken Homes And Gardens, is expected later this year.

Wire subscribers can read Byron Coley’s 2008 feature on Michael Hurley in the magazine’s digital archive.