Jack Hardy, The Ten Pound Fiddle, East Lansing, Michigan, USA, March 17, 2000
The co-star of the show was Willie Goggin's hat.
I was thrilled when I discovered that Jack Hardy was performing at the Ten Pound Fiddle on St. Patrick's Day. I'd just finished a review of a Jack Hardy CD, The Collected Works of Jack Hardy, for Green Man Review and liked his music very much. I grabbed my husband and a couple of friends and headed to the Unitarian Universalist Church in East Lansing, where the Ten Pound Fiddle rents a room most Friday nights for folk concerts.
I was sitting at the back of the room when the host introduced him, and Hardy breezed past me to the stage wearing a green velvet jacket, a tall, conical black hat perched jauntily on his balding, silver-fringed head. My friend said he looked like a combination of Dick Smothers, George Bush, and Festus. I thought he looked like a wizard, or an elf.
The hat was astounding and magnificent. Hardy explained that it had belonged to a Traveller friend of his in Ireland, Willie Goggin. After Willie died his wife and daughter gave the hat to Jack. He explained that the first time he'd accepted a gig just for the money, he lost the hat. He took that as a sign that he should never do anything just for money, and he's been playing folk music ever since. That hat charmed me completely. There was nothing silly about it. It seemed so right on the head of elfin, Celt-inspired Jack Hardy, his fitting tribute to a loved friend who had believed the hat gave him luck.
If you've never heard Jack Hardy's singing voice, let me tell you -- it sounds like a creaky wooden floor in an abandoned house. Nonetheless, it's not unpleasant. It's warm and expressive and interesting, and sounds the same live as it does on his records. The voices of Mike Laureanno and Tom Duval, who contributed background vocals and played bass and Stratocaster, respectively, added beauty to the songs. Duval's Stratocaster blended nicely with Hardy's acoustic guitar, and sometimes Duval took off on jazzy licks that seemed to say, "I could really wail on this thing if I wanted to."
Hardy was generous with his repertoire, playing for about two hours and treating us to old and new songs, filling in the gaps with anecdotes that shed light on the songs without interrupting the momentum of the performance. Many of these songs were about Ireland and Irish people he has known. He began with "Willie Goggin's Hat," from his 1997 _Passings_ album, after telling us the story I mentioned earlier. "Síar ón nDaingean" ("West of Dingle") is from his forthcoming album, Omens, and tells of an Irish woman he saw in a pub who had to take off her many rings before she could begin playing her fiddle. The title of "Sending Home the Slates" refers to the fact that those Irish who received money from relatives in America could afford to have slates instead of thatch on their roofs.
He sang "The Tinker's Coin," which was inspired by a Traveller he met in Dublin once. This man had an invisible friend sitting beside him at the bar, and he told Hardy this friend had taken a liking to him and would travel with him when he left Dublin. Hardy was skeptical at first (though he said the invisible friend became more apparent the more pints he swallowed). A few days later, in the Highlands of Scotland, Jack found an old Irish penny at the bottom of his pint, the same kind of penny the Traveller had been dropping into his drinks in Dublin for good luck.
He sang two train songs: "The Zephyr," inspired by his longing to escape from Hudson, Indiana, the small town where he grew up; and "The 20th Century," named partly after the famed 20th Century Limited. I don't want to give all his anecdotes away; suffice it to say, he tells a story about himself and Roy Orbison. "The Yellow-Billed Cuckoo" was preceded by an explanation of how he once tried to combine a late night of drunken debauchery with an early morning of bird watching.
Two of his livelier numbers were the jig "May Day," complete with audience participation -- clapping on every eighth beat -- and "The Boney Bailiff," on which Hardy showed off his considerable skill with words, and knocked on his guitar several times during the refrain to represent the bailiff knocking on the doors of Irish houses to evict the unfortunate inhabitants. Other numbers included "Blackberry Pie," from 1978's The Nameless One, "Síle na gcioch" ("Sheila"), with Hardy on mandolin, and my personal favorite, "The Hunter," as his only encore number.
Hardy rarely performs in public, but he is a treat to see, and to meet. At the Fiddle show he seemed relaxed and friendly, circulating freely during the intermission and talking pleasantly to anyone who approached him. I highly recommend his concerts to anyone lucky enough to have the chance to attend one.
More information about Jack and his recordings can be found at his Web site. For an insightful essay on the Rom and other Traveling folk, read Terri Windling's The Road That Has No End: Tales of the Traveling People.
