The Last Folk Singer

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. 

His live sets involve at least as much off-the-wall storytelling as music. You never know when a bit of between-song banter might stretch into a 15-minute yarn culminating with a dead chihuahua found in a dumpster or Frank nearly shot and killed by a friend’s father. These stories—filled with exaggerated voices for different characters; lines suddenly sung instead of spoken, like he’s a preacher catching the spirit; and dramatic pauses for sips of beer—may be harrowing or hilarious, uplifting or nauseating. Often, they’re all of the above. The subject matter is contemporary, but the delivery is old-fashioned, harkening back to the days of the traveling musician as chronicler, comedian, spiritual seeker, and conduit of lore. The way Davis sees it, Frank’s performances connect him to a long tradition of Appalachian folk singers and storytellers. A Muslim friend of mine once said, only half jokingly, that if Frank were born in a different time and place, he might have been a wandering Sufi mystic.

His current pilgrimage will take him from Cookeville, Tenn., to Edison, Wash.; from Churning Man, a butter-themed EDM festival in Horse Shoe, N.C. (tagline: “A butter world is possible”), to Berlin, Warsaw, and Krakow. Over 100 shows, running from March to September, many of them in places where most musicians don’t bother to stop. Since 2010, he has been touring tirelessly with little to no recognition or support from the independent music industry. No manager, no agent, no publicist; booking shows himself, relying on word-of-mouth—and, more recently, social media—to bring people out, selling records and T-shirts hand-to-hand after he plays. He rarely gets traditional press, and his streaming numbers are modest, topping out in the low four figures. But he can fill a room in just about any city in the U.S., more than can be said for plenty of artists who appear to be significantly more popular online. 

He started off playing to no one—“existential crisis gigs,” he calls them—coming home broke, picking up shifts at bars and pizza shops until he saved enough money to go out again. Now, at 39, he makes his barebones living on the road, supplementing his earnings with food stamps. “A lot of people our age are trying to save up money, to buy a house or whatever,” he says. “I don't save money. I just get by, and I can get by easily on this. I’m blessed, because most people have no clue what to do in life, and they feel lost and stuff. I don’t have to worry about any of that. This is the reason I’m here. It’s obvious what I have to do.”

At some point along the way, he became the smiling avatar of a broad strain of American DIY music, beloved by harsh-noise hellraisers and psych-folk treehuggers alike. At his tour kickoff show in New York, one of the other acts on the bill was a video game developer who demoed a new game in which Frank himself appears as a character, bopping around and offering encouragement to the protagonist in their quest to take down big streaming. He took the art-dance-noise-pop band Guerilla Toss on their first tour, over a decade before they signed to Sub Pop and collaborated with Stephen Malkmus and Trey Anastasio. The first time G Toss singer Kassie Carlson saw Frank play was at Gay Gardens, the now-legendary Boston punk house where she lived at the time. “I remember thinking, is this guy for real?” she says. “It’s poetic, and it’s kind of my favorite type of vocal style, where one word is flowing into another, and it’s almost sort of a rap. And he’s so charismatic, and every time he performs, everyone is sitting on the floor, and no one is looking at their phones, and he just pulls this energy from people that’s so beautiful.”

In between house shows on Frank’s current tour, he played a few dates in much bigger rooms, opening for Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band. Frank’s industry profile is low enough that Davis had to do a bit of explaining to the shows’ organizers about who he is and why the band wanted him to open. Frank is ruddy, bearded, longhaired, and sturdily built, or, in his own parlance, girthed. He can often be found wearing gym shorts, a roller coaster T-shirt, and Crocs shaped like Minions, with googly eyeballs on the ankle bands. There was some skepticism among venue staff. “He soundchecks for a minute and a half, and it’s always fun to watch the sound people be like, What is this guy’s deal?” Davis says. “And then after they see him connect with an audience, they’re like, OK, I get it now. You just put him in front of a room, he does his thing, and everybody’s in a good mood.” 

America today can wear you down, turn you cynical, make you forget, with its ugly, franchised homogeneity, that every person has their own weird story to tell. Frank Hurricane doesn’t have that problem. Spend a couple of days in his company on tour, as I did in late March, and you may begin to wonder whether he has some condition, an overgrowth of whatever gland it is that produces good nature. You have never seen someone stop and say hi to so many perfect strangers on the street, or honk his horn and wave at them from behind the wheel, as if compelled by some force he couldn’t control if he tried. You’ve never seen someone get so fired up with enthusiasm at the sight of a tree, almost any old tree, or a weird-looking building, or a roadside advertisement for HOLY BURGERS. He might throw his arms in the air and shout “Love ya, love ya!” in appreciation of these awesome sights, interrupting himself in the middle of a sentence and then continuing as if nothing had happened. He might do this 11 times in the course of a two-hour car ride. 

You may ask him whether his optimism comes naturally to him, or if he has to work for it, and you won’t be surprised when he says it comes naturally. You’ll laugh when, unprompted, he tries to come up with a list of things that make him upset. “If people put mayonnaise on my food, I fucking flip. I freak out,” he’ll say. “Yeah, mayonnaise, and…” He’ll trail off, unable to come up with anything else. To that short list, you might add Facebook (“Fascistbook”), GPS navigation (“They try to send you on all the shit where you pay tolls”), and ICE agents (“We gotta get them out the streets, back to sadly beatin’ their meats”). 

When you get to the venue, whether it be the backyard of a punk house, a garage converted on the cheap into an art gallery, a junkyard that hosts noise shows sometimes, or, on odd occasions, an actual bar, you will watch as the misfits gathered there greet Frank Hurricane as visiting royalty. Ask anyone in America who has spent time playing or attending shows in places like these whether they know him and the response may go something like this: Holy Frank? Of course I know that mystical shrymp. It will not particularly matter whether they’ve known him for years or just chatted with him once or twice at the merch table, where the lines to talk to him after a show can grow long. He has a way of welcoming everyone into his glow, a manner you might compare to a skilled politician’s if it weren’t such an obviously genuine extension of the warmth he radiates even when he isn’t performing that night. 

His lingo is part of it. Holy, mystical, spiritual, sacred, psychedelic—these adjectives, little reminders to appreciate life’s unceasing strangeness, can be appended to anything good, which for Frank means just about everything: mystical granny, psychedelic breakfast burrito, holy Walmart parking lot. People are shrymps, with a y, a coinage Frank made when a roommate at a DIY show house in Boston complained about him calling everyone “pimp.” (At the same house, he says, he was once reprimanded for how often he invited local homeless people over to have a few beers with him.) Chugging is drinking, dogging is eating, tugging is—you get it. A person who indulges often is a chuggernaut or a tuggernaut, epithets that contain more admiration than judgement. Lubricated might mean drunk, or it might refer to a spiritual state akin to nirvana, or it might mean buttered, as I learn over pancakes one morning when he asks me to pass the holy lube. I reach for the hot sauce and he gently corrects me: “No, the other holy lube.” 

His lexicon of slang, at once consecrated and vulgar, peppers his songs, stories, and regular conversation. It conveys something important about his outlook on the world, in which the low-down and the holy are one and the same. (It may be surprising, at first, to learn that he cites an interest in Latin and the roots of English, and the high-wire postmodern prose of Thomas Pynchon, as inspirations for his own sublimely ridiculous approach to language.) An attendee at one show tells me he likes the way Frank never explains the words, just trusts you to get them. Once you do, you’re connected with him, and with everyone else. 

Frank isn’t shy about admitting that he’d like that connection to happen at a bigger scale. The low streaming numbers, for instance, aren’t for lack of trying: he pours his heart into the messages he writes when submitting his songs to Spotify editorial playlists and never hears anything back. “It’s not about the money, it’s because I want to touch more people’s lives,” he says. When I point out that he might not be able to connect with people in the same way if he’s playing big ticketed venues, he thinks about it for a moment. “It’s interesting,” he says. “I have noticed that certain people playing the big, big stuff, bands that are signed to a label or whatever, it doesn’t seem like they’re having much fun. It seems boring. They don’t want to meet the people at their shows. They hide in the back. I will never do that.” For the last several years, he’s bounced between small labels and self-releases. Southern Shrymp (In the Big City) came out on Nudie Records, a label launched by a husband-and-wife team out of their Bay Area basement in 2020. Kassie Carlson once tried to get Sub Pop to sign him, but they didn’t bite. “I don’t know if he would even want to be under a label,” she says. “He’s just such a free person.” 

In the early 2010s, I was vaguely aware of Frank Hurricane as someone who rapped. (He still does from time to time, but you can hear a lot more of it on early releases like New Age Pymp and the Spiritual Thangz EP). Around that time, I caught a DJ set that was more like an experimental live performance, with old cassette tapes processed through guitar effects pedals. I knew he had a cult of major fans, but didn’t really understand why until my band ended up on a bill with him at a small psychedelic music festival in Milwaukee in 2024. It was a glorious day, and he played outside, by a funky-smelling stretch of the Kinnickinnic River that provided an ideal backdrop for the most compelling set of music I’d seen in as long as I could remember. Eventually we got to know each other. When I text him about coming to D.C. for the fourth show of the current six-month tour, and sticking around for another show or two after that, he writes back, “THANKS SO MUCH MY SHRYMP!!! Oh hell mothafuckin yes.”  

The D.C. show was organized by Luke, an old friend of Frank’s who does a lot of the DIY booking in town. The venue, Luke’s backyard, is listed on Instagram as “ask a shrymp.” Punks and yuppies alike manage to find it: about 50 people, by my rough headcount. A guy with a bodybuilder’s physique mans a grill, passing out hot dogs in exchange for the suggested donations that will constitute Frank’s payment for the gig. Representing the yuppies: Vinny, in an Oxford shirt and MoMA Yankee cap, brought along by some friends, who tells me he plans to stay for just a couple of songs, then go home to watch Jeopardy! on DVR. Representing the punks: a younger attendee whose name I don’t catch, possibly a teenager, in a black denim jacket with a patch that says “Art is Over,” who seems to be tripping on acid or mushrooms. It’s Monday night.

The first act begins before sundown: an experimental duo whose makeshift instruments include a can of Café Du Monde run through a contact mic into a guitar amp. This is a fairly typical opener for Frank, who came up in the 2010s-era noise scenes of Atlanta, and then Boston, as the only guy singing songs with an acoustic guitar. He’s also played in noise bands of his own, like an old duo called Scott Stapp, whose live sets involved things like Frank destroying a television set with a two-by-four while yelling “Creed!” over and over, and setting off roman candles inside. He’s mellowed out a little since then, but he still feels at home among noise musicians, “crazy nutcases,” he says, who recognize him as a kindred spirit. 

Forget the misanthropic aesthetics: Noise is social, community-oriented music—a gig, as much as anything, is an excuse to hang out with other people who like noise. It has a low barrier to entry, and it’s made by regular people with few professional aspirations, or else they wouldn’t be playing an amplified coffee can. It’s folk music, in other words. I know teachers and suburban dads who moonlight as noise musicians; in Richmond, Frank and I crash with a pillar of the local scene who runs a one-man gutter-cleaning business by day. This milieu suits Frank better than the folk crowd that aspires to play at Newport or Americanafest. “There are a lot of people playing good folk music, but the majority is what I call butt folk. You know, Mumford and Sons. They’re clapping and shit,” he says. “Noise is my roots. I think I connect with those people for the same reason that I connect with the wild shrymps at the coaster park, or the homeless people on the block. Because they’re just more interesting.”

It’s dark and there’s a fire going in the backyard by the time Frank plays. He’s got his Minions Crocs and gym shorts on, topped this time with a faded T-shirt for a roller coaster called the Maverick. He sits with his guitar at the fire’s edge and people gather around to listen, leaning against the fence or sitting cross-legged in the grass. The early spring air is alive with the hissing and cracking of Budweisers and Modelos. Frank plays for an hour and a half, a long set by any standard. There’s no amplifier or P.A., and I’m struck in a new way by the delicacy of his fingerpicking as it rings out into the evening, interrupted only occasionally by a neighbor down the block operating a power tool. Frank gets a good bit going about how the neighbor is accompanying him on an instrument called an electric sharter. The “Art Is Over” kid laughs so hard at the dead chihuahua story that I worry he might throw up. I notice that Vinny, who had been hovering near the back gate, has turned his Yankee cap backwards and sat on the ground, where he will remain for the entire set, Jeopardy! be damned. 

Frank's extraordinary stage presence is not far removed from his everyday manner, with the intensity dialed up just a notch or two. Like David Byrne, wide-eyed and perennially bewildered, he doesn't play a character so much as a heightened version of himself, turning his own personality into an artistic performance: half uncle, half oracle. "Some people meet him and they think it’s a bit, or something. Like, Oh, he’s this juggalo who speaks in his own vocabulary, and all the songs are about getting fucked up,” says Ryan Davis. “And I know him so well at this point that I know sometimes he can kind of puff it up, or make it more like, this is my personality, this is my vibe. But it's all sincere, all who he is. I don’t know how to say that in a way that makes clear that it’s not a put-on, because it’s very much not that.” The next day, I ask Frank if it's ever challenging to keep up a certain fun-loving persona that his fans expect of him. "I don't have to be Frank Hurricane," he answers, "because I am Frank Hurricane."

Before the music started, I’d been milling around, asking people what brought them to the show, especially those who didn’t seem like scene regulars. I met Daniel Marshall, a tall, handsome Alabamian with a trim beard who had driven over two hours to D.C. from Charlottesville, VA, where he was visiting a friend, when he heard Frank was playing. A fan since 2014 or so, Marshall is an enterprising and idealistic sort who left his job as a New York City public high school teacher to move back to his home state, where he co-founded a free summer camp and chairs the board of a nonprofit that helps Alabama residents set up worker-owned businesses. Last year, he and a few friends got some grant money to put on a sort of DIY academic conference in the state’s northeastern Sand Mountain region, famous for its snake-handling churches. The conference was about “the hidden connections between the urban and rural south”; Frank, Southern Shrymp (In the Big City), was a natural choice for the keynote performance. 

“I think Frank Hurricane is the best living folk musician in America and the inheritor of the sacred lineage of folk musicians,” Marshall said. “He captures the spirit of our age better than any folk artist who is doing music now.”

Marshall also told me about his aunt, Donna Waid, 76 years old and a major Frank Hurricane devotee. She attended the conference in Sand Mountain, where Frank performed on a makeshift stage set up in the bed of Marshall’s F-150. Now, she keeps a Polaroid of her and Frank together in her bedroom. They both hold Solo cups and his arm is around her; he gives a big open-mouthed grin and she smiles mostly with her eyes. 

One afternoon after getting back from tour, I give Waid a call. She can’t remember the name of her favorite Frank Hurricane song, but it involves “going up the mountain with his friends and so many types of beer,” which sounds about right. The service isn’t great, but the emotion in her voice is palpable. “He calls me Holy Donna,” she says. “It’s part of his fun. Who would have thought of calling me that? I know some people might feel like he’s being sacrilegious, but he’s not. He’s really talking about the spiritual part of regular life.”

I ask her what she likes about his music. With its gleeful hedonism and profanity, it’s a surprising fit for a woman of her demographic. “He’s so lively. He just makes me smile. It’s like I have a dear friend out there who’s singing a song to all of us, and I feel like it’s especially to me,” she says. “I’m frequently the oldest person in the room, and Frank makes me feel young again. When he’s performing, it doesn’t feel like a performance. It’s like you have some music and he’s talking to you. And that’s something I don’t hear very often. There are a lot of people my age who are just lonely, and I don’t feel lonely. Frank makes me feel included.”

There’s a story Frank sometimes tells from the stage about his first full U.S. tour, during which he and a friend spent a week stranded in rural central Washington, staying with a stranger who offered to fix their car and turned out to be going through active cocaine withdrawal. “He had left San Diego to escape a Yeti powder addiction,” Frank explains when I ask him to recount it. “And so, you know, he was freaking out and shit. And he had this German shepherd that was really badly behaved and would bust through the screen door, and it mauled a grandma's hand out in the street. Next day, that grandma with the mauled hand is sitting inside their house puffing down on the bong. It was fucking completely insane. But he really did fix the car.”

Over two days on the road, I hear about the pig Frank used to live with, named 5-0, who liked to break open cases of beer and lap up their contents. And the meth-addicted friend who showed up to a fancy benefit gala Frank was playing in a hat that said I LOVE SLUTS. The cousin who keeps getting arrested for pulling guns on people over minor perceived offenses. The schizophrenic who self-medicates with LSD and keeps 10 decrepit school buses in his junkyard-slash-noise-venue. The lady at the abandoned motel, flying on some hallucinogen or another, who slipped in a puddle of her own urine and thought she’d entered another dimension. The guy who eats weeds straight out of the ground. Frank’s humor and frankness in telling these stories reflect not insensitivity but an utter lack of condescension. He wouldn’t have the story about the I LOVE SLUTS hat if he hadn’t brought the guy with him to the gala. 

When he was a kid, his teachers would enlist his help in calming fellow students with intellectual or social disabilities who were having a tough time. When I ask him about this—So they just knew you were good at…—he cuts in: “Talking to psychedelic people, mystical people.” 

“It's always been in me,” he goes on. “Many times I've worked jobs with normal people, like as a host at a restaurant. And once you get to know these very normal people—first of all, I bug them out. They can't even have a conversation with me when I'm bugging out. But also, they're just boring. And these special people—they got a lot to say, and I can learn from them. And they're drawn to me too, which makes me really happy. I guess I just feel like I’m one of them, you know?” 

We’re driving down I-95, trying to figure out whether we have time to hit Kings Dominion and ride a couple of coasters on the way to the Richmond gig, when we get to talking about regrets. My job as a journalist is to consider all the angles, and I can’t help but be curious about the downside to a life of good times all the time. I know that Frank has recently gotten out of a long and happy relationship. “Holy Weekend,” the tenderly nostalgic closer of Southern Shrymp (In the Big City) and Frank’s favorite song he’s ever written, is about his time with his ex. (“Our neighbor saw me butt nekkid in that holy moonlight,” goes its melismatic emotional peak.) He’s copacetic about the breakup, prompted by both of their busy lives as artists. They remain close friends. He still loves her, he says. He admits to feeling lonely sometimes on the road—his mom wasn’t wrong about that. But, he says, “it’s an existential loneliness that’s beautiful. It’s what my songs are about. The loneliness of the solo shrymp is one of the most beautiful things in the world.” At one point in “Roadside Traveler Blues,” the song about the lonely juggalo and the schizophrenic, he sings “their job is to walk the spiritual pathways of the world.” I tell him that sounds like him. “The whole song is about me,” he says. “Me and people like me.” 

His real regrets, according to him, mostly involve “turning down opportunities for really crazy shit that maybe back in the day I would do.” People know from his songs and stories that he has an appetite for life on the edge—one song is called “Addicted to Thrills”—and they'll frequently invite him along for various hijinks after his shows. He used to say yes to everything, which was both exciting and generative for his work as a performer. He’d get a new crazy story to tell onstage, and then people would invite him to do more crazy shit. He’s pickier now, more concerned about safety, less keen to chug and drive. Once, the morning after a show in Murfreesboro, TN, a guy asked him to be an accessory to an armed robbery of a weed dealer in exchange for a shopping spree at Guitar Center. All he had to do was pretend to still be asleep on the couch where he’d crashed the night before, to make the setup that the dealer was about to walk into appear more real. The guy assured Frank that guns wouldn’t even be loaded, but Frank hightailed it out of there anyway. 

“I'm a little older now, and I'm more responsible, and this is my job, and I’m making money. Sometimes I have to say no to things that would be really good stories,” he says. “I think that’s a good thing, though. It's like, it would be awesome, but also, I don't want to die. I would rather live to tell more stories.”