Georgia - Legendary singer songwriter, Michael Hurley has been burned through the bone by unexpected hospital sojourns, obscurity, liquor and just plain old mean life. Who else can claim to be bluegrass, country and psychedelic all at once while proclaiming to be on “hipster control” in rock and roll wastelands!

Hurley’s songs have been covered by the Holy Modal Rounders, Espers, Violent Femmes Youngbloods while greatly influencing such indie and DIY artists such as Cat Power, Vic Chestnut, Lucinda Williams, and Calexico. He has also recorded for the impossibly important Folkways Records in the 1960s during which time period he tramped around the happening weirdness of Greenwich Village, New York City before the tourists and corporations vomited all over it with idiot glee! In 2001, Locust Music, an album on the frontier of all things avant-garde, reissued one of his albums.

The Ancestral Swamp finds Hurley eschewing his more humorous aspects as instead showing a weathered grizzled man who has seen the beauty and simplicity in life’s nightmarish buffoonery. He doesn’t always throw out the humor as the albums bookends testify. “Knockando” (what the hell does that mean?) and “She Got a Mathematic,” all are in good keeping with his trademark grouchy, subverted hippie Dom.

“Lonesome Graveyard” drifts with a lazy laid back soft electric piano melting with the rawhide vocals sung with half lidded weariness. Hurley sings with transcendent boogied out blues “I’m not a lamp but my wick is burning low.” With such death dealing reflections, the listener actually wants him to really be a lamp cause then he really can have his wick replaced.

Country stomping, “Light Green Fellow” drives a love blues like a railroad spike right through the heart. “Everytime I tap my foot the whole house started quaking” suggests supernatural lurkings.

The Ancestral Swamp like its title might suggest finds Hurley knocking on the door of that mysterious traditional American music genre called public domain. He covers Blind Willie Mctell’s “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues,” which goes weird with tremolo gutbucket guitar. He also tackles the cowboy classic “Streets of Laredo,” mutating the song into a kind of lullaby with shades of jazzy introspection. For those that don’t the irony of this, the song over its many versions covers likeable subject matter such as whores, syphilis, veiled homosexuality and the heights of grotesque debauchery. Also, Hurley can’t help to show his eccentricity by somehow finding the most obscure verses that are usually left out of these eternal songs.

If you just like good songwriting that willfully chills the marrow in your bones and thumps your heart with eternal inevitable gravity, please seek this album out and his sporadic recent live appearances. You even get some bawdy, sexed out comic strip inside. Michael Hurley can be summed up as living legend.

- By Matthew D. Proctor for The Stonewailer

Matthew Proctor resides (technically) in Stone Mountain, Georgia warding off despondent confederate soldiers. He spends his days and nights in a frenzy balancing the impossible task of making ends meet while pursuing creative pursuits such as urban archeology, obscure poetic explorations and two bands, which seem to make people uneasy. He also likes to crawl in muddy ditches away from capitalism’s fierce banter in whiskey and wine hazes. He has a black whiny cat named Montag who has severe mental health issues.