Michael Hurley / Ida Con Snock / 2009
Hog of the Foresaken
wry, loping, half-comic and half-elegiac
This is a shaggy-dog blues built around an invented, half-mythic character -- a hog-shaped stand-in for abandonment and outsider cool -- who collects debts, chews on falling angels, and sits mostly unbothered in some kind of cell or crate. It reads less like a story than a cartoon incantation, repeating a nonsense-name until it takes on the weight of a folk saint.
outsider identity mock-mythology patience and resignation blues tradition as ritual absurdist humor masking grief
Who's speaking
A narrator addressing a 'boy' directly, describing a third figure -- the Hoggothy Forsaken -- almost like a folk preacher relaying a tall tale or hymn about a local legend. The narrator seems amused but also a little awed, and not fully reliable or literal.
What happens
The song doesn't progress through events so much as circle a single figure from different angles: first as a debt-collector with a blues-bar swagger, then as a strange eater of falling angels waiting on something that won't come, then as a captive of sorts who has made peace with confinement, and finally as a figure of mercy who offers one last chance before giving up on you. The closing repeat of the opening verse suggests the figure is cyclical, not evolving -- he was always already there and will remain.
How it's built
Four verses of near-identical shape bookended by a returning first verse functioning as a refrain, giving the song a closed loop rather than a build. Each verse adds a new, disconnected image to the character sketch rather than advancing plot, and the choruses lean on incantatory repetition of the title phrase and stray words trailing off into a stutter.
Section by section
Opening/closing refrain
“got the boogie, boogie, boogie blues bar”
The figure is introduced as a street-corner presence who collects what's owed and radiates a weary, hip-shaking cool. The image of a blues bar that heaven itself can't reach sets up an opposition between worldly, embodied suffering and a distant, ineffectual holiness.
Second verse
“chew the angels falling”
Here the character is recast as something closer to a scavenger of ruined divinity, patiently waiting on no particular answer. The fixation on pie, repeated almost mindlessly, reads as a comic deflation of that cosmic image -- grand, falling angels reduced to a craving for dessert.
Third verse
“he is the pork of crime”
This section leans hardest into dark comedy, placing the figure in a confined, cell-like space and naming him with a punning criminal title. His lack of urgency about his own captivity suggests resignation rather than despair -- he has simply outlasted worry itself.
Fourth verse
The tone shifts slightly toward moral authority: the figure offers a chance and will not plead if it's refused, framed almost as a biblical warning. Singing to both friend and enemy, and to both the present and some unspecified past, positions him as a kind of timeless witness rather than an active character.
Return of refrain
Bringing back the opening verse unchanged closes the loop and resists resolution. Nothing here has been settled or explained; the figure simply persists, as blues figures and folk ghosts tend to.
Craft
- invented epithet / mock-myth name
- The repeated title phrase functions like a folk-religious title, half invented saint and half tall-tale nickname, giving a nonsense figure instituted weight through sheer repetition.
- anaphora
- Nearly every verse opens with the same conjunction-plus-name formula, turning the song into something closer to a litany or children's rhyme than a conventional narrative verse.
- stammering repetition
- Words like the trailing repeats of 'boogie' and 'pie' mimic blues vocal phrasing, turning plain nouns into near-meaningless incantatory sounds that emphasize mood over message.
- surreal imagery
- Images like eating falling angels or lying in a dark wet box resist literal sense, functioning instead as dreamlike shorthand for suffering, patience, and strangeness.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the Hoggothy Forsaken as a comic folk-deity Hurley invented to personify a kind of stoic, animal endurance -- part hobo saint, part blues archetype, built from cartoonish, almost nonsensical imagery that nonetheless accumulates real pathos through repetition. A second, equally plausible reading is that the song is simply playful nonsense verse, a vehicle for sound and rhythm with no fixed allegorical payload, in keeping with Hurley's cartoonist sensibility of inventing absurd creatures for their own sake rather than for message.
Context
Michael Hurley spent decades populating his songs and album art with invented creatures and alter egos (wolves, snakes, and similar figures recur across his catalog), often blending wry humor with genuine melancholy. This track fits that pattern of treating a cartoon-like character as a vessel for blues feeling rather than literal narrative, though I don't have specific documented background on this song's origin or the particular meaning of its central name.
Listen for
- the way the refrain's melody repeats unchanged, reinforcing the song's circular, non-narrative shape
- the stammered trailing repetitions on certain words, which mimic blues vocal phrasing more than they convey literal meaning
- the contrast between grand or strange imagery and the loose, talking-blues delivery, which keeps the song from tipping into solemnity
- how little actually happens across the verses despite the song's forward momentum -- it's portraiture, not plot
About Michael Hurley
Michael Hurley was an American folk singer-songwriter who was a part of the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to playing a wide variety of instruments, Hurley was also a cartoonist and a painter.
1941 - 2025 / Astoria
Full biography and catalogue