Jack Hardy (singer-songwriter)

Jack Hardy is a lyrical singer-songwriter and playwright based in Greenwich Village who has been influential in the North American and European folk music scenes for decades. He has been cited as a major influence by Suzanne Vega and many others who emerged from that scene in the 1970s through the 1980s.

Career

Beginning in the mid-seventies Jack has hosted Monday Night Pasta Dinners at his apartment on Houston Street (pronounced "HOW-stun"), to which all songwriters are generously welcome. He also began a small, informal songwriter's group at The English Pub in Greenwich Village, which later became a more formal songwriter's night at the Cornelia Street Cafe in December 1977. This group would later evolve into the Songwriter's Exchange, releasing an album on Stash Records in 1980. Eventually, the group formed a cooperative, led by Jack, and took over the booking of the Speak Easy in 1981, which became a thriving venue for songwriters. Jack was also the founder and first editor of Fast Folk Musical Magazine in 1982. Hardy is a graduate of the Pomfret School in Connecticut and the University of Hartford.

Although more popular in Europe than in his native America for much of his career, Hardy has recently seen a reignited interest in his music, and tours regularly on both sides of the Atlantic.^{[citation needed]} In songwriter circles, Hardy is as well-known as a teacher and mentor as he is as an artist. To this day, songwriters continue to gather at his hallowed Houston Street apartment one night a week to play their latest (and sometimes unfinished) work, and to face criticism from Hardy and their gathered peers. Fueled by pasta and wine, the weekly songwriter's sessions are famous for the artistic and political conversations that have flowed in them and the large number of remarkable songs that have emerged from them. When the introduction to a new song gets too long and/or apologetic from a songwriter, Hardy is known to quip, "Shut up and sing the song.") The hundreds of songwriters who have frequented Hardy's apartment gatherings over the years includes names both unknown and famous -- among them, Suzanne Vega, Brian Rose, Richard Shindell, John Gorka, Jeff Gold, Wendy Beckerman, Richard Julian, Christian Bauman, Linda Sharar, Rod MacDonald, Lucy Kaplansky, and Christine Lavin. The weekly songwriter's session has itself made it into a number of songs by Hardy alumni, including "Jack's Crows" by John Gorka, the title song of Gorka's second album, and "Boulevardiers" by Suzanne Vega. The group has also more recently been immortalized in fictional form in Christian Bauman's 2008 novel "In Hoboken," which includes two chapters that take place in the Houston Street apartment, and a character named "Geoff Mason" who bears a striking (and, according to a public radio interview with Bauman, intentional) resemblance to Hardy.^{[citation needed]}

While Hardy's name has never achieved the level of fame of many of his adherent followers (e.g., John Gorka, David Wilcox, and The Roches), he has continued to build on his substantial catalog of literate, well-crafted songs.

Discography

Jack Hardy (1971)
Early and Rare (1965-1974, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Jack Hardy)
Mirror of My Madness (1976)
The Nameless One (1978)
Landmark (1982)
White Shoes (1982)
The Collected Works of Jack Hardy, Part I, Volumes 1 - 5, 1965-1983
The Cauldron (1984)
The Hunter (1987)
Retrospective (1990)
Through (1991)
Two of Swords (1992)
Civil Wars (1994)
Songs of Jack Hardy (tribute), Volume One: Of the White Goddess (1995)
The Collected Works of Jack Hardy, Part II, Volumes 6 - 10, 1984-1995
The Passing (1997)
Omens (2000)
Bandolier (2002)
Coin of the Realm: Songs for the New American Century (2004)
The Tinker's Coin - Celtic Anthology (2005)
Noir (2007)

External links

Jack Hardy website, maintained by Ron Mura.
Jack Hardy at Allmusic
reflecting on his brother's death, New York Times, September 2001
"Keeper of Village's Folk Tradition Battles Eviction" by Susan Saulny, New York Times, November 2 2000