The Last Folk Singer
On the road with Frank Hurricane, DIY hero and mystical troubadour of the American underbelly
Frank Hurricane will be on tour for the next six months. Along the way, he’ll take a few breaks for the essentials: family, roller coasters, a two-week hike. But mostly, he’ll be driving from city to city in a 2012 Hyundai Accent with his guitar and other worldly possessions stuffed into the trunk and back seat. For company, there is Hank, a Troll doll with a shock of Einstein-white hair and a couple of regional beer logos pinned to his blue sweater, given to Frank by his mother as a good luck charm and constant companion at around the time it became clear that his calling was to play songs and tell stories as a modern-day traveling bard, a life that she worried could get lonely.
Frank wouldn’t change a thing about it, including the hours in the car with Hank, which are just about the only ones he spends in true solitude. He makes friends wherever he goes, often with the sorts of people he sings about: gas station attendants, delivery truck drivers, elderly people, homeless people, fellow waiters-in-line at the theme parks where he spends much of his time off. “Roadside Traveler Blues,” one of my favorite Frank Hurricane songs, opens on a scene of a “spiritual roadside juggalo,” walking from place to place with no purpose but to “make it to your door/and not get run o’er.” Frank himself has been roaming since a childhood spent moving across the South: Chapel Hill and Fayetteville, N.C., Columbia, S.C., Johnson City, Tenn. Most recently, he lived in Philadelphia, but when he left for tour, he gave up his room in a communal apartment and packed into storage everything that wouldn’t fit in the Hyundai. He’s not sure where he’ll settle when he returns.
“He fits this trajectory of a folk troubadour who’s always on the road, hiking and staying in people's homes, and moves every couple of years,” says Ryan Davis, who came up on the same DIY circuit as Frank, and whose Roadhouse Band has lately enjoyed the sort of aboveground acclaim that has so far eluded his old friend. “But really, there’s nobody like him. He’s a singular force of nature.”
“Roadside Traveler Blues” comes from Southern Shrymp (In the Big City), Frank’s new album. He accompanies himself on acoustic guitar, sounding both meditative and a little rowdy, accenting his intricate fingerpicked figures with the occasional thwack of a string pulled hard and snapped like a rubber band against the frets. As the song goes on, he sings in his gruffly friendly baritone about a “holy roller schizophrene/shittin’ off a log and dippin’ in a bog and everything in between,” and a guy who finds himself living at a “white rastas’ collective,” which, for some reason, “puts it all in perspective” for him. All of Frank’s characters, he says, are based on friends and acquaintances he’s made in his extensive travels.
Elsewhere on Southern Shrymp, there is “Girthworm Jim,” a heroic ballad about a man hiding out from the police on the Appalachian Trail, smoking Delta-9 and eating honey buns. And “Taylor & Rhonda,” about a “psychedelic lesbian” laid off from her job at an Amazon warehouse and hoping to get hired by Dollar General. Think about Walt Whitman, “I Hear America Singing”—the regular sorts of people Whitman celebrated, whom few poets before him had considered worthy of tribute in verse: the mechanic, the shoemaker. Fast forward 166 years to the decaying America we live in today and you may begin to get a sense of Frank Hurricane’s subjects. He hears the vape store employee singing, and the nitrous fiend in the music festival parking lot.
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