Jack Hardy, Folk Singer and Keeper of the Tradition, Dies at 63
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/arts/music/jack-hardy-folk-singer-and-keeper-of-the-flame-dies-at-63.html
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: March 12, 2011
Jack Hardy, a folk singer and folk music promoter whose Greenwich
Village recordings and songwriting workshops kept alive the
neighborhood tradition of counterculture troubadours, died on Friday
in Manhattan. He was 63.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, his son, Malcolm, said.
Mr. Hardy wrote hundreds of songs protest songs, political talking
songs and romantic ballads his lyrics often consciously literary,
his music tinged with a Celtic sound. With a singing voice raspy and
yearning, he performed in clubs and coffeehouses in New York and
elsewhere and recorded more than a dozen albums, many of them
self-produced, though two boxed sets of his work were released by a
small, independent label in 2000.
"I'm undoubtedly the least famous person with a boxed set," he
boasted in an interview that year.
Perhaps he wasn't famous, but he was, in his way, influential.
In the early 1980s, after Bob Dylan had gone electric and folk music
had been shunted aside by disco and punk, Mr. Hardy helped found a
musical cooperative for like-minded folkies. It established a
performance space and made more than 1,000 low-budget recordings of
local performers and distributed them to subscribers and radio
stations, along with a newsletter, under the rubric the Fast Folk
Musical Magazine.
Lyle Lovett, Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman and Shawn Colvin all
recorded first for Fast Folk, according to the Smithsonian
Institution, which holds tapes of the original recordings and the
magazine archives. (A two-CD set is available from the institution's
nonprofit record label, Smithsonian Folkways.) Mr. Hardy's song "St.
Clare" was covered by Ms. Vega and appears on her 2001 album "Songs
in Red and Gray."
Since the late 1970s and up until recently, when he entered the
hospital, Mr. Hardy was the host of Monday night workshops at his
railroad flat on West Houston Street. Songwriters from as far away as
Boston and Philadelphia would come to share a pasta dinner and their
brand-new songs. Critiques were expected; the rule was that no song
was supposed to be more than a week old, a dictum, Mr. Hardy said,
that forced writers to write. Ms. Colvin, Ms. Vega and Mr. Lovett are
all alumni.
John Studebaker Hardy was born in South Bend, Ind., on Nov. 23, 1947.
His mother, Lillian, is a painter; his father, Gordon, is a musician
and the past dean of students at the Juilliard School and a past
president of the Aspen Music Festival.
Young Jack grew up in New York City, Aspen, and Durham, Conn.. He
graduated from the University of Hartford, where he edited a student
newspaper and in 1969 was convicted of libeling President Nixon for
publishing a vulgar cartoon depiction of him. (The conviction, and a
$50 fine, were overturned on appeal.) He moved to the Village in 1973.
Mr. Hardy was married and divorced twice. In addition to his son, who
lives in St. Louis, and his parents, who live in Manhattan, he is
survived by a brother, Christopher, of Coeur d'Alene, Ida.; a sister,
Susan Suechting, of Elk Mound, Wis., three daughters, Morgan, of
Manhattan, Miranda, of Syracuse, N.Y., and Eva Peck of South Lake
Tahoe, Nev., and two grandchildren.
Mr. Hardy said the "fast folk" idea was born out of a need to keep
the music alive.
"The whole idea was to do it fast," he said of the music that he and
others recorded and distributed in the 1980s and 1990s. "You could
hear a song at an open mike or songwriters' meeting and two weeks
later it was being played on the radio in Philadelphia or Chicago. It
was urgent, exciting. It was in your face."
.
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