Jack Hardy, Folk Singer and Keeper of the Tradition, Dies at 63

We were shocked & sadened when we learned of the untimely death of Jack Hardy back in March.

For those of you who didn’t know Mr. Hardy, he was kind of the New York version of Jeanette Campbell – Spending most of his life and his energies in promoting live music and songwriters. As a result of his efforts, many talented artists that were just starting out were brought to the attention of a much-larger audience.

Bruce Weber from the New York Times wrote a wonderful obituary and tribute to Mr. Hardy that we’ve included exerpts of here:

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 (March 11, 2011) 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… 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. 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 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.”

A great man and a tremendous friend to music… He will be sorely missed!