What comes to mind first when I think of Jack Hardy is “original song”, which is not, as it is often mistaken for, an ‘original sin’ that you can tap your foot to. It is often mistakenly thought that if you wrote the song that it is an “original song”. Nothing could be farther from the truth.  If you pen a song that is no different than any other, then it is not original, it is a fraud.  Jack Hardy showed us a major lesson when he gazed beyond our fraudulent works, not in dismay, but as if he saw the true thing hovering behind, puppet like, in waxen shadow.  We had just brought the wrong thing frontstage.  But like all other magic acts the masters make it look easy.  That spoken, I found Jack Hardy to be sweetly, and dangerously original, so to, to the detriment of his own deserved acclaim.  I and hundreds of others have benefited grandly from his generosity.  When I was penniless and nameless, on the merits of a bedroom labored cassette tape, he flew me, raw boned and blowzy, from my tumbleweed steel town digs in Fontana, California, and plopped me down on the time-honored stage of The Bottom Line in New York City.  It was there and then that I took my place amidst a bevy of real bona fide songscribes, and now I’m proud to say, after what seemed like a dream, the Smithsonian Institute is now grappling with the residue of those tin-horn performances.  Hardy was a perfect representation of himself.  What came so easy to him brought out the compassion to help others, and he kept that up until the day he died. Ultimately Jack Hardy owned a unique style of community that he purposely allowed to overshadow his craft as songsmith. 

He could kick your ass at songwriting, and he could then hang you out to dry if you though to yourself, maybe more creatively than your song, that you might be more compassionate.  The sound of his voice, which of course haunts us a little bit now, was most often that of heart-torn crooning, sometimes like a character actor from an RKO film noir, and yet other times even like Winnie the Pooh picking up gravel with a steam shovel.