Michael Hurley / Long Journey / 1977
Hog of the Forsaken
wry, mournful, and mystically calm
A surreal folk parable built around an animal-totem figure, the 'hog of the forsaken,' who exists outside ordinary human suffering. Hurley uses this grotesque, oddly serene creature to meditate on fate, forgiveness, and the strange comfort of things that don't participate in human anxiety.
mortality and acceptance outsider/scapegoat figures folk surrealism mercy and last chances time and patience
Who's speaking
An unnamed narrator describes the hog from a slight remove, part storyteller and part witness, addressing the listener directly at times as if warning or instructing them about this creature's nature.
What happens
The song opens by establishing the hog as immune to grief, feeding on fallen angels rather than mourning them. It moves through a series of images—baking strange pies, sitting in a dark bog—that build the hog into an emblem of patient, amoral endurance. By the final verses the hog becomes an agent of mercy and judgment, offering people one more chance before consigning them to whatever comes after, and finally becomes a kind of universal singer, performing for everyone regardless of allegiance or circumstance.
How it's built
The song moves in loose, almost nursery-rhyme verses without a true chorus, relying on the repeated phrase naming the hog to anchor each stanza. Each verse adds another facet to the hog's character rather than advancing a plot, so the structure is additive and incantatory, building toward the final verse's shift from description to song-within-song, where the hog itself becomes a performer.
Section by section
Opening verse
The hog is introduced as beyond sorrow, feasting on divine casualties. This sets him apart from mortal grief from the first line, establishing him as a figure who metabolizes loss rather than suffering it.n n
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The hog functions as a stand-in for something like fate, death, or a folk-deity of the abandoned, letting Hurley discuss heavy themes through absurd, tactile imagery instead of abstraction.
- repetition/refrain
- The recurring naming phrase for the hog acts like a folk-ballad refrain, giving the song a ritual, incantatory quality even without a conventional chorus.
- surreal imagery
- Images like eating fallen angels or baking strange-colored pies destabilize literal meaning, forcing the listener to read the hog symbolically rather than narratively.
- tonal irony
- The hog is called criminal and pork of crime in the same breath that presents him as patient and merciful, creating a comic-grotesque ambiguity about whether he is villain or saint.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the hog as a folk personification of death or fate itself — indifferent, patient, oddly nourishing, and ultimately generous in offering people a last chance before their end. An alternative reading positions the hog as an outsider or scapegoat figure, a stand-in for the socially forsaken (tramps, criminals, the forgotten) who possesses a strange dignity precisely because he has nothing left to lose. Hurley's fondness for anthropomorphic animal characters across his catalog supports either reading; the ambiguity seems intentional rather than a gap to be resolved.
Context
Hurley was known for blending backwoods folk phrasing with cartoonish, animal-populated mythologies (he was also a visual artist and cartoonist), and 'Hog of the Forsaken' fits his recurring habit of using animal characters as vehicles for oblique philosophical or spiritual commentary. I don't have specific documented context about the writing or recording of this particular song beyond the album credit, so this reading rests primarily on the lyric itself.
Listen for
- The flat, unhurried vocal delivery that mirrors the hog's own lack of urgency
- How the melody stays plain and folk-simple even as the imagery turns strange
- The shift in the final verse from describing the hog to describing him singing
- Word choices that blend the sacred (angels) with the crude (pie, bog) without tonal friction
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