Family of the troubadour and one-man folk institution Michael Hurley announced his death yesterday at age 83. He had just returned home to Oregon from the Big Ears music festival in Knoxville, and died the next day.
Most obituaries point to Hurley cutting his teeth in the same Greenwich Village folk revival scene in the '60s that produced Bob Dylan.
But that was never really a good fit; maybe the Village folks were a little too serious for Hurley. Looking at the cover of "First Songs," his 1964 debut on Folkways Records, is kind of funny. On it, the label tries to introduce "Mike Hurley," a dreamy and somber folkie. Hurley was more of the draws-the-cartoons-for-his-own-album-covers type of hippie than a searing truth teller. With some friends, he had formed a band called "The Three Blues Doctors" that made their name in a Village coffee shop by all performing different songs at once on the same stage.