Smithsonian Folkways Shares Video for “The Werewolf Song” Animated by Drew Christie
“Still the perfect introduction to Hurley…. The universe it comes from is just as strange now as it was [those many] years ago.”
–NPR (Fresh Air)
“Though his music and album artwork was playful… Hurley found a way to tap into the serious parts of life simultaneously, using minute details and sweeping reflections to encourage listeners to take a step back and admire the bigger picture of life before them.”
–Pitchfork
“These 12 songs suggest that Hurley’s ‘hippie bard’ musical vision was fully formed from the start.”
–All Music
Outsider songwriter and underground hero Michael Hurley (1941–2025) made an indelible mark on the world of folk music. A godfather of the “freak-folk” movement, he paved an unconventional path as a musician and songwriter across his storied six-decade career. His debut album, First Songs, is a touchstone for the indie folk and indie rock artists who count Hurley as an influence. Smithsonian Folkways will reissue First Songs as a vinyl LP on November 6.
Recorded for Folkways Records when Hurley was just twenty-two, First Songs features Hurley singing and accompanying himself on guitar, and lays the foundation for his visionary, freewheeling style, edged in the somber tones of peripatetic blues and balladry.
Today, Smithsonian Folkways shared the official music video for “The Werewolf Song,” animated by Hurley’s friend Drew Christie. Hear/Share here. Christie describes sharing the animation years ago with Hurley himself: “When I finished the animation, I showed it to Michael down in Astoria, and he loved it right away. He said, ‘That’s always how I pictured him moving and stepping! You got it!’”
In First Songs, Hurley introduced themes and characters that he would spend the rest of his life revisiting. His long-running werewolf-trickster persona first appeared in “The Werewolf Song,” alongside the gentle “Blue Mountain,” the pleasures of imbibing in “The Tea Song” and “I Like My Wine,” and rambling in “Just a Bum.” Raw and unhurried, the album presents one-take, unedited, original folk and country blues that display a confidence belying Hurley’s youth.
After leaving Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where Hurley was recovering for six months from hepatitis, mononucleosis, and early traces of tuberculosis from a bohemian life in Greenwich Village, he began renting a small stone house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Not far away lived Frederic Ramsey Jr., who recorded First Songs in his own New Jersey home—eschewing a professional recording studio at Hurley’s request, and kicking off Hurley’s lifelong practice of crafting lo-fi (a term he claimed to have invented) homemade recordings. Ramsey used the same reel-to-reel tape machine to record Hurley that he had used in 1948 for what became Lead Belly’s Last Sessions (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings). The vinyl LP reissue includes the original liner notes by Ramsey.
The New York Times called Hurley “a spiritual forebear and elder ally for songwriters at the country and folk fringes of indie rock,” while Pitchfork designated him a “beloved eccentric folk singer whose music became a touchstone for a generation of singer-songwriters.”
As evidence, see Cat Power’s rendition of the album’s “The Werewolf Song,” which has been streamed millions of times. Will Oldham, who often performs as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, regularly asks “What would Michael Hurley do?” as a guiding principle. Yo La Tengo has recorded a few of Hurley’s classics, while indie band Big Thief credits Hurley’s songs for its formation. On his passing, the band remarked on how Hurley wrote “some of the most heartachingly beautiful melodies of all time, some of the most magical words…. Songs that contain worlds within worlds.”
The LP reissue was painstakingly remastered by GRAMMY-nominated engineer Mike Monseur (The Seldom Scene, The War & Treaty, Wynonna Judd) and will be issued on Folkways’ iconic original tip on/black jacket LP.
About Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the “National Museum of Sound,” makes available close to 60,000 tracks in physical and digital format as the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian, with a reach of 80 million people per year. A division of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the nonprofit label is dedicated to supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among people through the documentation, preservation, production, and dissemination of sound. Its mission is the legacy of Moses Asch, who founded Folkways Records in 1948 to document “people’s music” from around the world.
