The Big Ears curse struck quickly this year. Impermanence is swift.
A number of artists that I've seen at Big Ears - Alvin Lucier, Harold Budd, Jaimie Branch, Jon Gibson, Phil Niblock, and Mimi Parker of the band Low, among others - died within a year of their performance. Outsider folk musician Michael Hurley played Big Ears this year, although I didn't see him, and then passed away just a few days later, setting some sort of record for swift impermanence.
Musicians Zakir Hussain and Susan Alcorn were both scheduled to perform at Big Ears this year but both passed away before the festival even began, so the record may actually be in negative numbers.
Born in 1941, Hurley was part of the original Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960s. He recorded his debut album, First Songs, for Folkway Records at the age of 22, and his second and third albums were released by his boyhood friend Jesse Colin Young (The Youngbloods). He's probably most famous for his 1976 Have Moicy! album, a collaboration with the Holy Modal Rounders (credited as the Unholy Modal Rounders). He had lived in rural northwest Oregon and frequently performed in and around Portland.
His brand off off-key, laid-back, goofy folk music wasn't my cup of tea, but there's no denying the man was an artist who followed his own idiosyncratic muse to the end.
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