Michael Hurley - First Songs

Michael Hurley's First Songs is set to return on vinyl, the oddball 1964 folk debut that introduced one of American music's great eccentrics.

Hurley was barely into his twenties when he cut these songs for Folkways in 1963, recorded on the same reel-to-reel machine that had captured Lead Belly's Last Sessions. That detail feels fitting, since the record sits right where old-time folk and country blues meet something stranger and far more personal, and it planted the seeds of a cult career that would stretch across six decades.

The songs are loose, funny and quietly profound, delivered in an unhurried voice over spare acoustic accompaniment. "Blue Mountain" has a dreamy, faraway pull, "I Like My Wine" is a sly toast to simple pleasures, and "The Werewolf Song" turns old folklore into something eerie and oddly tender, the kind of skewed fable that became a Hurley trademark.

Cartoon werewolves would later turn up again and again in his homemade comics and artwork, and you can already hear that playful imagination at work here, along with a gift for melody that never seems to try too hard.

For fans of freak folk and the Americana underground, this reissue is a chance to meet the Snock right at the very beginning.