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Michael Hurley, Influential Outsider Folk Singer, Dead at 83

Michael Hurley, the folk singer-songwriter influenced a generation of singer-songwriter, has died.

Michael Hurley was known for singing and writing songs that were delivered warmly and plainly, often in a lo-fi presentation, about unconventional subject material. But after releasing the album, Hurley became a father and a husband, and spent the next half-dozen years working a series of odd jobs, which he chronicled to a journalist years later in his own words: “Groundskeeper, Machine operator, foundry worker, cookie bakery worker, carding mill worker, shoe pattern shop worker, moccasin maker, carpenter, apple picker, tipi maker, grocery store general helper who was handy with a broom and could stock shelves and make kielbasa sausages, artist’s model at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art, hot pretzel vendor on streets of Boston, hospital janitor, janitor at Paris Cinema Boyleston St, Boston.” In his A+ review, the critic Robert Christgau raved that the record “renew[ed] the concept of American folk music as a bizarre apotheosis of the post-hippie estate.”

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