Wonderful album from 1969. Michael Hurley is an American original who first recorded for Folkways in 1965; more recently for Honest Jons’ Lal Waterson tribute, Migrating Bird. Play-and-play-again stuff.

His lovely Folkways LP from 1965, when he was just 22, with classics-in-the-making like Blue Mountain and The Werewolf Song.

First-time-out for these early-seventies recordings — countrified drafts of some classic Hurley, with backing from Vermont mates the Fatboys, aka the Deranged Cowboys.

Precious 1964 recordings, top-notch though never previously released, part of the First Songs sessions for Folkways.

Laid-right-back — with old buddies Dave Reisch and Lewi Longmire, and Tara Jane O’Neil; a Blind Willie McTell and a Lightning Hopkins; and unmissable goes at favourites like Light Green Fellow. One of the very best Hurleys of them all.

Mass, full-voice singing from the rural South of the US. A stirring, tearful, ancient, strange, kind of Gospel. Ornette called it ‘breath music. They’re changing the sound with their emotions.’

Selected and presented by Shirley Collins.

His second LP, from 1965. Mostly his own songs — including Anti Apartheid — with Roy Harper singing on A Man I’d Rather Be, and John Renbourn duetting on Lucky Thirteen. Bert swaps his steel-string for a banjo, to close with 900 Miles (the same year Terry Callier made it his own, for Prestige).

Originally released on Stefan Grossman’s Kicking Mule label in 1979, after the break-up of Pentangle. With Martin Jenkins, Nigel Portman-Smith, Luce Langridge — and Jacquie McShee on one track.

Wildly entertaining sixties outsider Americana from this one-man band out of south Georgia. With songs like I’m So Depressed, Cocaine, Vietnam and The Reason Young People Use Drugs.

45s and LPs spanning the period 1964-1973, including his long-lost album debut. The original material here trumps the folk chestnuts. Alasdair Roberts does Lord Randall a lot better, has to be said.

A kind of greatest hits of the one-man-band, albeit all rare now, or previously unreleased.
An early version of Abner’s signature song I’m So Depressed, on LP for the first time, is followed by four unreleased recordings, on electric banjo, drums played by his feet, and harmonica.
The second side features Abner’s charged, mournful last recordings, not for the faint of heart, made two months before his death. These were released by Mississippi as a ten-inch EP back in 2011, entitled Last Ole Minstrel Man.

‘A moody, atmospheric delight. Jim’s roots in composition via tape-editing have evolved into a highly musical assembly of found-and-processed sounds that achieve near-orchestral majesty as they hang in the very air of the drama that unfolds in Kyle Armstrong’s Hands That Bind.
‘Described as a ‘slow-burn prairie gothic drama’, set in the farmland of Canada’s Alberta province, and starring Will Oldham and Bruce Dern, Hands That Bind is a spellbinding trip to the existential bone of rural working life in North America. As conflict rises over hard worked patches of land to provide a mere and mean existence, a desperate air settles in, as a series of mysterious, often supernatural occurrences rock the small community.
‘O’Rourke’s vaporous, serpentine musical backdrops and atmospheres reflect the obsessions and distractions of the film’s principles; moods of all sorts seen or otherwise implied. Additionally, the music highlights cinematographer Michael Robert McLaughlin’s closely observed accounting of the farmers’ environment, as well as the striking widescreen images of the big sky country with unnerving flair.’