Described as a ‘spare little thing’, on Wolf Dispatch the musicians Jolie Holland and Max Knouse pay tribute to Michael Hurley who died earlier this year at the age of 83. Cosy with the odd cackle of laughter and a suitable chill when their chosen material leads them to more feral or supernatural ends, the seven songs selected from the slackened oeuvre of the outsider folk icon stretch from favourites like ‘O My Stars’ and ‘I Paint a Design’ – from the acclaimed Snockgrass and the late-eighties offshoot Watertower – to the hitherto unreleased ‘B Bottom Girl’ which Hurley asked Holland to sing after the pair became friends and collaborators, with Holland appearing on his record Land of Lofi back in 2013.
Compelled by the death of Hurley in April, the project is an outpouring of Holland’s longstanding admiration for the songwriter, who was part of the Greenwich Village folk scene and released his debut album First Songs on the Folkways label in 1964 before breaking through to a wider audience in the early seventies when Rounder Records picked him up and released such cherished works as Hi Fi Snock Uptown and Have Moicy!
Holland was introduced to his music by Lemon DeGeorge in 2003, with the Ether Ship and Phoenix Thunderstone performer – who would engineer her records Escondida and Springtime Can Kill You – handing her a copy of Hurley’s subsequent Rounder effort Long Journey. She was soon transfixed, describing what she heard as something:
sourced from the same ancestral swamp where all folk/rock/blues musicians of his era were fishing. He had evidently been using different bait. The way he referenced melodic lines from earlier jazz and gospel felt so fresh.
Sharing a similar admixture of styles and a penchant for tramping on the margins, Holland says that she scarcely listened to anything but Hurley’s music for the next ten years. And while Wolf Dispatch is billed as a duo album, its songs were recorded piecemeal over the past decade at Holland’s home in Los Angeles and other intimate locations, with the Catalpa and Wine Dark Sea artist overdubbing her parts on a couple of tracks which were captured at Shane Kennedy’s place, where the drummer formed a trio with Walter Stone on the bass and Knouse on vocals and guitar.
That opener ‘B Bottom Girl’ as requested by Hurley is one of the earliest pieces collected on the record and also one of its crispest efforts sonically, as Holland’s languid drawl and Adam Brisbin’s steady backing on the guitar are burnished by Doug Wieselman’s wriggling mandolin while Jolie delivers a fine, aching violin solo midway through the piece.
The other recordings sound more lo-fi as with a few altered phrases and Knouse playing accompaniment, the headline duo launch into a spiny take on ‘I Paint a Design’, seemingly foregoing Hurley’s familiar Portland to inhabit the arid landscapes of the southwest. One of the songwriter’s most distinctive compositions, ‘I Paint a Design’ uses the visual arts – with Hurley himself a cartoonist and painter who tended to design his own album covers – as a filter and frame, at once regaling the listener with a tale of lovestruck and lovelorn rambling and offering a mystical take on the artistic process, which is figured here through images of white horses and fire-breathing dragons.
Jolie Holland has already proven herself a trenchant interpreter of other people’s songs, with her cosmic rendition of the Townes Van Zandt gem ‘Rex’s Blues’ closing out Pint of Blood while Wine Dark Sea featured the ardent funk of Joe Tex’s sundown classic ‘The Love You Save (May Be Your Own)’. Her native Texan drawl and stretched melismas make her voice among the most distinctive in all of contemporary music while her whistling is nonpareil, as she demonstrates on ‘O My Stars’ which she describes as the ‘quintessential Michael Hurley love song’, setting the track down while confined to her home shortly after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
It is Max Knouse’s voice which comes to the fore on the title piece ‘Wolf Dispatch’ and to stunning effect again on ‘The Vt.-Ore. Floor’, both of which he recorded at Shane Kennedy’s place in Vermont alongside the drummer plus Walter Stone on bass while Holland later overdubbed her viola and backing vocals at the home studio of David Robbins in Los Angeles.
Somewhere between Arthur Russell and Bill Callahan, the native Ohioan shares with Holland a certain lilting quality and melodic freeness, their voices dovetailing nicely despite his plainer tone and delivery. It is this fine-fettled croon which breaks ground on ‘The Vt.-Ore. Floor’, a song which otherwise makes stellar use of Holland’s droning viola and recalls in manner and theme ‘Catalpa Waltz’ from Jolie’s debut album, both tunes finding their narrators stumbling through taverns and bars under moonlit skies in staggered and even rhapsodic fashion.
‘New Tea’ continues in much the same vein, starstruck and jagged, with Holland once more singing the lead as Hannah Marcus backs her up and plays the acoustic guitar, while Knouse’s electric axe was captured so far off-mic that in Holland’s own words ‘we compressed the hell out of the track to bring up Max’s playing’. The song comes from Parsnip Snips, a collection of Hurley’s home recordings from between the years 1965 and 1972 some of which were intended for a never-realised second Folkways album. Holland says that ‘New Tea’ is one of her favourite ever songs, its simple yet spellbinding couplets about a heartsick stroll down those old familiar train tracks conjuring the same bluesy swirl as some of her own catalogue:
I walked down the track, the stars refused to shine
and it seemed like every minute I was gonna lose my mind
My knees was weak, my footsteps all I heard
and it seemed like every minute I was steppin’ in another world
If I would’ve listened to my second mind
you know I wouldn’t be here standin’ round cryin’
Wolf Dispatch draws to a close with a twist, as Holland tackles the ‘Ghost Woman Blues’ of George Carter who played the twelve-string guitar, recorded four songs for Paramount Records in 1929 and is believed to have hailed from the Atlanta area. Michael Hurley covered the song on his 1984 album Blue Navigator and Holland admits that she straddles both versions through her rendition, sharing beyond her affinity for Hurley an intimacy and keen understanding for the phraseology of the south.
This is an intoxicating recording of those ‘Ghost Woman Blues’, spectral and windswept or shining out of the darkness like a will-o’-the-wisp as Holland whistles and sings with David Coulter of the Pogues bowing that eerie musical saw as an overdub. Between trilling whistles and Carter’s lyrics – which describe a lonesome graveyard and a disembodied voice which speaks out with ghastly allure – we get to hear the ambient sounds of east Los Angeles including the neighbourhood coyotes, the shrill howls of LAPD sirens, the wop wop of police helicopters and a few barks from Holland’s dog Jocko, who is named after a Hurley cartoon and duly managed to get his paw prints in on the mix.
