Michael Hurley, a singer and songwriter whose music — an idiosyncratic kind of folk mixed with a variety of other styles — made him a revered elder to younger artists like Cat Power, Devendra Banhart and the band Yo La Tengo, died on April 1 in Portland, Ore. He was 83.
Mr. Hurley’s family announced the death but did not specify the cause.
Mr. Hurley was visibly ill during his final shows — two on March 28 and 29 in Knoxville, Tenn., as part of the Big Ears Festival, and the third on March 31 in Asheville, N.C. — before flying back to Portland, said Regina Greene, the booking agent for his Southeast shows.
Mr. Hurley stopped breathing on the ride to his home in rural Brownsmead, Ore., and after his driver tried to revive him, he died in the ambulance taking him to a hospital, said Eric Isaacson, the owner of Mississippi Records, one of several labels Mr. Hurley recorded for over the years.
For more than 60 years, Mr. Hurley performed (somewhat under the radar and usually in intimate spots) and recorded (often at home on his reel-to-reel tape recorder) in a gentle, twangy and worldly voice, accompanied by his guitar and sometimes nothing else. He wrote and sang about subjects as diverse as love, drinking (tea and wine), the human digestive system and a weeping werewolf.
“I never thought of a career in music,” he told The New York Times in 2021. “What I do is goof off — and try to get away with it.”
At some point he adopted a nickname, Snock, which he used on album covers and elsewhere.
“His songs are timeless; you can’t tell if they were written in the 1400s or now,” said Mr. Isaacson, whose label reissued some of Mr. Hurley’s old albums as well as releasing some newer ones. He added: “He’d perform a song that I hadn’t heard, and I’d ask, ‘What’s that, an old English air?’ and he’d say, ‘No, I wrote it last night.’”
In “Sweedeedee,” from his early 1970s album, “Armchair Boogie,” Mr. Hurley talked his way through the first verse:
My little woman causes me a lot of trouble sometimes
She worries me so bad
I don’t know what to do.
I take a walk
Figure the rolling of my feet would come to ease my mind
I’ll just go away
And I won’t know
Where I’m going.
Chan Marshall, who performs as Cat Power, recorded “Sweedeedee,” and restructured its lyrics, on her 2000 album, “The Covers Record.”
“‘Sweedeedee’ is such an intense love story,” she said in an interview. “You couldn’t understand it if you hadn’t played house with someone and lost that love. That really resonated with me, being young, loving that song and mourning my losses.”
In the late 1990s, Mr. Hurley’s unconventional music developed a following among indie rock bands and practitioners of the genre that came to be known as “freak folk.” Mr. Banhart, a leading light of that genre, said that he drew inspiration from reissues of Mr. Hurley’s early albums, as well as from the original comics Mr. Hurley tucked into them. (Mr. Hurley was renowned not just for his music but also for his surreal cover illustrations, which depicted, among other things, wolves cruising in cars, getting wasted and wolfing down pies.)
“He hasn’t created a character just to sell records,” Mr. Banhart told The Times. “He has created his own world for the sake of enjoying making it come to life.”
Michael Hurley was born on Dec. 20, 1941, in Jersey City, N.J., and grew up in rural Bucks County, Pa. His father, Dunlea Hurley, known as Pat, drove his family to theaters in Florida in the 1950s to produce operettas; his mother, Alice (Moussette) Hurley, managed the house.
When he was a toddler, his older sisters spun him around on a 78-r.p.m. turntable until he squealed. He wrote his first song at 5; at 16, he started teaching himself to play a guitar that a sister’s boyfriend had left behind. (He also played fiddle and banjo.)
He did not graduated from high school, and he began his troubadour-like rambles at 17.
“A muskrat will do the exact same thing,” he told Popwatch magazine in 1997.
He hitchhiked to New Orleans, to Mexico and to New York, where he found his way to the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village and performed during the folk revival of the early 1960s.
He recorded his debut album, “First Songs” (1964), after meeting a Bucks County neighbor, the music historian Frederic Ramsey Jr., who produced it for Folkways Records (now Smithsonian Folkways Recordings). Recorded in Mr. Ramsey’s home, it included “The Werewolf Song,” about a mournful monster, which he also sang at Carnegie Hall in May 1965, as part of a four-day folk festival that featured Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. “The Werewolf Song” (later simplified as “Werewolf”) would become one of his signature numbers.
He sang, in part:
For the werewolf, for the werewolf
Have sympathy
Because the werewolf he’s someone
Just like you and me.
Once I saw him in the moonlight
And the bats were flying.
All alone I saw the werewolf and
The werewolf was crying.
Mr. Hurley’s childhood friendship with Jesse Colin Young, the leader of the Youngbloods, led to the release of “Armchair Boogie” and “Hi Fi Snock Uptown” in 1972 on the group’s imprint, Raccoon Records, distributed by Warner Bros. (Mr. Young died last month.)
“Hurley has written a number of absolutely great songs,” Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders, a kindred musical spirit who collaborated with Mr. Hurley and others on the 1976 album “Have Moicy!,” said in an interview. “But my take is that one in four or five were great — ‘O My Stars’ and ‘Sweet Lucy’ are masterpieces — but the rest are not so good.
“But,” Mr. Stampfel added, “his batting average is better than Irving Berlin’s.”
Among Mr. Hurley’s champions was the veteran rock critic Robert Christgau, who once praised him as an “old-timey existentialist” whose “oblique wail recalls both Jerry Garcia and John Prine because all three are more obsessed with mountain vocal styles than most mountain vocal stylists.”
Mr. Hurley released albums on several labels, including his own, Bellemeade Phonics, as well as Mississippi, Gnomonsong and No Quarter. The last album he released before his death was “The Time of the Foxgloves” (2021), on No Quarter. Another album, “Broken Homes and Gardens,” is to be released this summer.
Mike Quinn, the owner of No Quarter, said that Mr. Hurley was “as consequential an American songwriter as there is.” His compositions, he said, were “almost like children’s music for adults, but with themes about death, love and relationships.”
Mr. Hurley is survived by a daughter, Daffodil Stark, and two sons, Jordan and Colorado Stark, from his marriage to Marjorie Stark, whom he called Pasta, which ended in divorce; a son, Rollin Miller, from his relationship with Kim Miller; a daughter, Wilder Honey, from his relationship with Bethanie Miller; two sisters, Maureen Hurley and Jeanne Remaily; and two grandchildren.
Mr. Hurley was a regular at the Nelsonville Music Festival in Ohio for more than a decade. His ode to that event, “Are You Here for the Festival,” is on “The Time of the Foxgloves.” It begins:
Did you ever leave Nelsonville
With a broken heart?
Did you ever leave Woodstock
Falling apart?
You was doing all right
Things went wrong
You was up all night
Singing along.
