East Fairfield is a small village of just over a thousand people in northern Vermont, about half an hour from the Canadian border. Approaching from the west, you crest a large hill and the land begins to open up. Horses graze in slanting pastures, and the faint smell of manure comes and goes as you pass the occasional dairy farm. It was here and in the surrounding towns that the folk singer Michael Hurley spent much of the ’70s and ’80s, playing at ski lodges and bars with his bands The Redbirds and Automatic Slim & the Fatboys. When music didn’t pay the bills, he worked for local farmers, transporting bushels of hay and clearing rocks from fields.

Hurley cemented his cult status with the 1976 release of Have Moicy! — a record so wonderfully strange that longtime Village Voice critic Robert Christgau named it album of the year. In the five decades since, Hurley — who is playing here tonight — further developed his unique brand of folk music, churning out records full of slapstick barroom romps and surreal ballads. His music is often referred to as “outsider folk,” which, given the breadth of folk as a genre, feels like a polite way of saying Hurley has an underground following, being too weird for mainstream appeal. Still, outsider isn’t a bad way to describe him. 

Born in 1941, Hurley grew up in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, roaming the Delaware River woodlands. He spent the summer after his freshman year of high school hitchhiking around the country, making it as far as Matamoros, Mexico, and spending a night in a Louisiana jailhouse on his way home. Hurley then dropped out of school to yo-yo between Pennsylvania and New York City, playing music with friends who later went on to join bands like The Youngbloods and The Holy Modal Rounders. His debut record, First Songs, released in 1964 when he was just 22, sounded less like a product of the ’60s folk revival than something Alan Lomax might have recorded years earlier in some deep pocket of Appalachia. As it so happens, that’s more or less how the album came into being. Hurley befriended Fred Ramsey Jr., a writer and musicologist with ties to Folkways Records who lived nearby in Bucks County and secured him a deal with the label. They recorded First Songs in Ramsey’s house on the same reel-to-reel device he had used to tape Lead Belly’s final Folkways session almost two decades prior. 

The album was largely ignored, but Folkways wanted another from Hurley; he hit the road instead. For a while, Hurley — known to his intimates as “Snock” — rambled between Mexico, Philly, and Cambridge, among other places, working a series of odd jobs, including selling tamales, selling pretzels, transporting cookie dough for a bakery, and working in various factories around Boston. 

More than half a decade passed before he released his second album, Armchair Boogie, recorded in his Brookline, Massachusetts bedroom. In many ways, Armchair Boogie is the first proper Snock album, being the first record to include Hurley’s art on the cover and in its liner notes. Ever since, he’s adorned his albums with cartoon dreamscapes that often feature anthropomorphized animals like Boone and Jocko, two wolves that he’s included in his paintings and comics since he was a teenager. Armchair Boogie also pivoted from the darker mood that largely defined Hurley’s debut album, leaning towards the sentimental whimsy that’s come to define his music. 

Hurley’s lyrics achieve a deceptively childlike tenderness distinct from anything else in post-sixties American music. Or American poetry. (After all, Hurley is a type of poet — “if you was in a monkey suit, and me, in the suit of an owl / I wouldn’t give a hoot, I’d only howl.”) 

I recently came across a comic strip of his, in which Boone and Jocko eat a noxious pie with an obscenely rendered, six-breasted she-wolf, before being driven up into the nearby trees with bad gas. What can be said about those cartoon wolves howling and farting from the tree-tops? Or about the silly cockney accent Hurley does on “English Nobleman” (“Oi em an English nobleman / A nobleman em oi”)? Or the five-minute-long mouth-trumpet solo that opens “Give Me the Cure”? 

Still, the whole of Hurley’s output is something more than the sum of its parts. As is the case with other great but forbiddingly weird American artists — R. Crumb, say, or Frank Zappa — Hurley’s refusal to compromise his artistic vision for audience approval has allowed his music to push past mere eccentricity or “quirkiness” and become a world unto itself.

Hurley hasn’t wavered in his vision in the slightest. There hasn’t been a “Christian phase” or a world music album or any of the self-important flailing that his contemporaries have indulged in as they’ve aged out of relevance. Just six decades worth of his own reliably bizarre and authentic brand of folk.

The East Fairfield Union Meeting House used to be some combination of a church and a town hall, but it’s since been renovated by a group of locals who restored the old hand-made organ, repainted the high ceilings, and turned it into a music venue. Some old-timers that Hurley used to live alongside and perform for still live in these hills, as do their kids and grandkids, making tonight’s crowd distinct — though, to be sure, some younger Burlington hipsters have made the trip as well. Altogether, around 150 people fill the wooden pews.

Eighty-two is old, I realize. The man walking down the aisle before taking the stage is no longer the young folky gazing at me from the cover of First Songs. He moves slowly, and he’s wiry in the way old men in the country often are. But it’s still Snock. He’s wearing his trademark welder’s cap and has the same mustache and scraggly white hair he’s sported for decades.

Hurley opens with “When I Get Back Home,” and his hands seem unhampered by age as he plays the guitar in his same old way — a kind of pluck-and-flick that he taught himself as a teenager in Pennsylvania, similar to a clawhammer, but more delicate. His voice is deeper and froggier than it was a few decades ago, but it’s remained clear. He even manages a few controlled yodels and falsetto warbles on “Wildgeeses” and “I Paint a Design.” 

Just as he finishes his set, the entire room rises and whistles and claps as he putters over to his guitar case. We don’t stop clapping until he starts heading back to the center of the stage. He’s been playing for an hour and a half at least, and you can tell he’s tired, but he grins and takes a seat. Someone in the back shouts, “Hey Snock, play ‘Slurf Song’” — an old Have Moicy! hit. He obliges the encore request, returning dutifully to his guitar case for one more. We chant along: “Oh, I see the dishes over there / They fill me with despair.”

While he’s in town, Hurley stays with Bob Iwaskiewicz and Michele Bessett, who were his guitarist and manager, respectively, during most of his Vermont years. Bob and Michele are married now and have lived in East Fairfield together since the ’70s. The morning after the show, they kindly invite me over to their home to speak to Hurley. Michele has a green thumb, evidenced by clusters of daffodils and tulips. Hurley and I sit down together in the dining room, where they practiced during the days of Automatic Slim & the Fatboys. I ask him how it feels to be back.

“It feels nice — the scenery, the wildness, reflecting about how I lived here and there, talking with old friends,” he says. “But so many friends have passed. It’s kind of startling in a way. Majority of people we had in the community are gone now.” He pauses and laughs. “So why am I still here?” 

We talk about his sold-out shows on this latest tour and about his newfound acclaim. He attributes the shift in his reception to the rerelease of First Songs under the title Blueberry Wine by an independent label, which became a cult hit among younger folk fans. “That album had been rejected by the folk community that existed in ’64 and ’65. The folkies didn’t take it as legitimate anything — not as folk music or nothing,” he says. “I always had a sense of failure about that album.”

“It comes out, and I go and tour around, and I’m up in St. Paul, Minnesota. The local record store wants me to go and do an in-store performance,” he tells me. “So I go there, and the place is packed. People are all excited to meet me on the basis of the rerelease of that first album on Folkways. And I go, holy shit. It was a good album. Almost 40 years later.” 

Hurley goes on for a while about the history behind the album and his early influences, back when he began to play music in the ’50s. Hurley’s father produced musicals, and he says the operettas of those early performances were some of the first tunes he was exposed to. His family also listened to popular jazz — Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller records were playing constantly. In high school, he discovered the blues and early rock and roll in local record stores. He fell in love with Lead Belly, Blind Willie McTell, John Lee Hooker, Hank Williams, Fats Domino, and Chuck Berry.

“I discovered Lead Belly’s music and I liked the blues. I fancied myself playing the blues,” he says. “I keep thinking about Lead Belly. He was sort of a giant to me.”

“Were you seeing people perform around New York and stuff?” I ask. “Were you going to a lot of shows back then?” 

“No. The only live shows I had really seen were those operettas. One of the first songs I actually learned was ‘Ol’ Man River’ from the operetta Show Boat. You know ‘Ol’ Man River?’” he asks in return.

“Sure.” I hum the melody of the first verse as he mumbles along. Then he closes his eyes and sings louder. He sings the whole song. “We had this lyric book of operetta tunes in the house,” he says when he’s done. “I can remember reading the lyrics out of there and singing ‘Ol’ Man River.’ I was probably nine or ten years old.” 

Hurley has little to say about the rock music scene that emerged, particularly in California, during the late ’60s. He claims he had little to do with the politics and cultural developments of that scene.

“I kind of wasn’t the typical hippie during the Summer of Love — Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, all of that. I wasn’t remotely like that,” he says. “I was working in factories around Boston, trying to support my wife and kid.” 

But he does talk about his exposure to the West Coast’s underground comic scene in the ’60s, including Zap Comics and the work of R. Crumb, whom he loves. We discuss Hurley’s own self-published comics, like his zine The Morning Tea, which he sold during a brief stay in Cambridge in the early ’60s. 

“The Morning Tea was really different. That was when I was eating peyote,” he mentions, before describing a Burroughs-esque cut-up method he and his friends used to put the thing together.

“So the drug culture back then filtered to you a bit, right?” I ask him.

“Well, we all wanted to smoke marijuana, but it wasn’t available too much,” he replies.

“But Peyote was?” I press on.

“Yeah. You could mail five dollars to this farm in Del Rio, Texas, and you’d get a box this big full of fresh peyote buttons,” he says, outlining a shoebox in the air. “So we ate those. I only took LSD maybe once. I never really took anything but peyote.”

I ask whether peyote influenced his art and songwriting. “Oh yeah. Definitely, I think,” he responds. He leaves it at that.