Moondog
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Moondog was actually a guy called Louis Hardin. He was the 'blind American street musician' that inspired the Pentangle song of the same name - something I had wondered about for years - Jacqui McShee confirmed that this was the case, and I was surprised to learn that she owns a copy of Moondog 2! Antoine Maloney tells me he was 'a busker who hung around the 52nd to 54th Street area and around the old Madison square Garden in Manhattan. That was the heart of the Jazz area in the 40's and 50's and he knew and was friends with many of them such as Charlie Parker - thus Lament for Bird on his Columbia recording in -I think - '67.' He dressed in Viking regalia - certainly the outfit he is wearing on the sleeve of the 1969 Moondog album would suggest that he had interesting dress ideas. I hear that Walter Winchell, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus and Arturo Toscanini helped him get a record deal. I have also been told that he didn't busk, he actually made a pretty good living selling poetry. Moondog released his last album in 1997 and died at the age of 83 in Munster, Germany in September 1999. KNPR broadcast an obituary and a short interview with Moondog's business manager in Germany, you can hear it here, and here is a transcript.
Louis Hardin was born in Marysville, Kansas, May 26, 1916. His father was an Episcopal minister. At the age of sixteen he was blinded when a blasting cap went off in his hands. In 1933, he attended the Missouri School for the Blind at St. Louis and it was around this time that he decided he wanted to be a composer. He finished his schooling at the Iowa School for the Blind where he got his first formal training in music and heard his first classical music. He left the Iowa School in 1936 and lived in and around Batesville, Arkansas until 1942 when thanks to Virginia Sledge he won a scholarship to study in Memphis. His patron was I. L. Meyers. In the autumn of 1943 he went to New York and met Artur Rodzinski who let him attend the rehearsals of the Philharmonic. There he met Leonard Bernstein who was the assistant conductor. Artur later introduced Louis to Toscanini. He started using the Moondog pen-name in 1947 in honour of a dog he had in Hurley, Missouri, who used to howl at the moon more than any dog that Louis knew of. Hüs - a stringed instrument with a triangular case with gut strings stretched on either side and played with a bow. There are two versions - a large and a small. They were built by Jerry Walters and Mark Unger worked out musical notation for them. Hüs is Norwegian for house. Trimbas - these are also triangular in shape. They are drums made from Honduras Mahogany and the heads are soft leather. The drums lie on the floor with the heads vertical. The large drum rests on it's base and the small one on it's apex. Moondog uses a maraca in his right hand to play "on-beat" and a clave in his left hand to play the "off-beat". The maraca keeps up an eighth-note pulsation. A cymbal is bolted to one side of the large drum and produces a shimmering sound when the drum is struck. |
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