Singer and songwriter Michael Harley – mixed with a singular kind of people and various other styles – he passed away on April 1 in Portland, Oregon, as he became a respected elder of young artists such as Cat Power, Devend Ravan Hart and the band Yolatingo.
Harley's family announced the death but did not determine the cause.
Mr. Harley was visibly sick on the final show – said his southeast booking agent Regina Green, who was 29 years old in Knoxville, Tennessee, in March 28th and 29, before returning to Portland third in Asheville, North Carolina on March 31st as part of the Big Earths Festival.
Harley stopped breathing on a ride to his rural home in Brownsmead, Oregon, and after the driver tried to revive him, he took him to the hospital and died in an ambulance, said Eric Isaacson, owner of Mississippi State Records, one of several labels Harley has recorded over the years.
For over 60 years, Mr. Harley played for over 60 years in a calm, disgusting, secular voice accompanied by a guitar and sometimes nothing else (under the radar, usually in an intimate place), and recorded at home on a tape recorder on a reel to a reel). He wrote and sang a variety of subjects, including love, drinking (tea and wine), the human digestive system, and crying werewolves.
“I never thought about a career in music,” he told the New York Times in 2021.
At one point he adopted the nickname “Snock,” which he used on album covers and elsewhere.
“His songs are timeless. I don't know if they were written in the 1400s or now,” said Isaacson, who reissued Mr. Harley's old album and released a new album. He added: “He played a song I've never heard of and he'll say, 'No, I wrote it last night.' ”
With “Sweedeedee” from the early 1970s album Armchair Boogie, Hurley went through his first poem.
My little woman sometimes causes me a lot of trouble
She's very worried about me
I don't know what to do.
I'm going for a walk
I understand that rolling my feet will soften my mind
I'll just leave
And I don't know
Where I go.
Chan Marshall, who performs as Cat Power, recorded “Sweedeedee” and reconstructed the lyrics for his 2000 album “The Covers Record.”
“'Sweedeedee' is a very intense love story,” she said in an interview. “If you didn't play the house with someone and lost that love, it didn't make sense.
In the late 1990s, Harley's unconventional music gained support among indie rock bands and genre practitioners who have come to be known as “freak folk.” Van Hart, a major light in the genre, said he drew inspiration from the reissue of Mr. Harley's early albums and the original comic, Mr. Harley, pushed them into them. (Mr. Harley was well known not only for his music but also for his surreal cover illustrations.
“He doesn't create characters just to sell records,” Van Hart told The Times. “He created his own world to enjoy making it happen.”
Michael Hurley was born December 20, 1941 in Jersey City, New Jersey, and grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His father, Danley Hurley, known as Pat, drove his family to Florida theatres to produce opellets in the 1950s. His mother, Alice (mouse set) Harley, managed the house.
When he was a toddler, his older sister turned him on a 78 rpm turntable until he rang. He wrote his first song at 5am. At age 16, he began teaching himself to play the guitar left behind by his sister's boyfriend. (He also played the fiddle and banjo.)
He had not graduated from high school and began to have toes like Trubador at the age of 17.
“Muskurat would do the exact same thing,” he told Pop Watch magazine in 1997.
He hitchhiked to New Orleans, Mexico and New York, where he found his way to a coffee shop in Greenwich Village, where he performed during the folk revival of the early 1960s.
He recorded his debut album, First Songs (1964). After meeting Bucks County neighbor, music historian Frederick Ramsey Jr., he produced it for Folkways Records (now Smithsonian Folkways Recording). Recorded at Mr. Ramsey's home, “The Wedwolf Song” was also sung at Carnegie Hall in May 1965 as part of a four-day folk festival featuring Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. “The Wearwolf Song” (later simplified as “Werewolf”) becomes one of his signature numbers.
He sang partially:
For Werewolves, for Werewolves
Please sympathize
Because the werewolf is someone he is
Like you and me.
If you look at him in the moonlight
And the bat was flying.
I saw a werewolf alone
The werewolf was crying.
Harley's childhood friendship with Youngblood leader Jesse Colin Young led to the release of “Armchair Boogie” and “High Foy Snock Uptown” on the group's imprint, Raccoon Records, in 1972.
“Harley writes a lot of absolutely amazing songs,” said Peter Stampfell of the Holy Modal Rounds, a musical spirit of relatives who worked with Mr. Harley and others on his 1976 album “Have Moicy!”. “But my view is that one in four or five was great. 'My Star' and 'Sweet Lucy' are masterpieces, but the rest aren't that good.
“But his batting average is better than Irving Berlin,” added Stampfell.
Among Mr. Harley's champions was veteran rock critic Robert Christgau. He once praised him as a “old-fashioned existentialist.”
Hurley has released albums on several labels, including his own Bellemeade Phonics, Mississippi, Gnomonsong and No Quarter. The last album he released before his death was “Time of Fox Gloves” (2021), with no quarter. Another album, “Broken Homes and Gardens,” will be released this summer.
Nor Quarter owner Mike Quinn said Harley “is an American songwriter in the end.” His compositions are “like children's music for adults, but they have themes about death, love and relationships,” he said.
Mr. Harley survived the marriage between his daughter Daffodil Stark and his two sons, Jordan and Colorado Stark, to Marjorie Stark, what he called the pasta he divorced. his son Rollin Miller due to his relationship with Kim Miller. Due to his relationship with Bethany Miller, his daughter Wilder Honey. two sisters, Maureen Hurley and Jeanne Rimiley; and two grandchildren.
For over a decade, Harley has been a regular at the Nelsonville Music Festival in Ohio. His ode ode to that event “Are you here for the festival?” is at “Foxgloves Time”. It starts:
Have you ever left Nelsonville?
With a broken heart?
Have you ever left Woodstock?
Will it fall apart?
You were okay
Things didn't go well
You were awake all night
Sing together.
