Have you ever heard of Moondog? Probably not. But if you know this story you should know how crazy it is. And if you don’t know it, I’m going to tell you a true story about an almost legendary guy: Moondog. 

Our story takes place in the USA during the first part of the 20th century. Louis Thomas Hardin, the real name of Moondog, was born in 1916 in the state of Kansas. He’s the son of a pastor but he quickly became atheist and he was fascinated by Nordic Mythology. Also at the age of six years, he assisted at a traditional Amerindian “Dance of the Sun”. It’s a traditional ritual during which some Amerindian tribes dance and play for many days. It was for him an important experience and music and rhythms have left a strong impression on him. Another life-changing experience was when a stick of dynamite blew up to his face at the age of sixteen. This accident made him totally blind for the rest of his life. These two events marked him for the rest of his life and music became his greatest passion and hobby. He started by playing organ with his father and then he went to a school for the blind where he continued to learn music. After the school for the blind, he obtained a scholarship to study music at the Memphis university. 

He arrived in New York in 1944 with the dream to become a great composer and even the best in the world. So he started to play music and his compositions in the street. He was composing music, poems and even creating new instruments specially for his compositions. He met during this period the most important musicians and composers of his time. He was soon recognized as a music genius by the other musicians. He became friends with a lot of them and with the director of the New York Philharmonic, Arthur Rodzinski. But his appearance and his dress style, and also the fact that he was living and sleeping in the street, became a problem for some people and he was refused entry to certain places. Indeed, because he was an anticonformist and refused to follow trends and rules, he was wearing a big beard and long hair. For these reasons, a lot of people compared him to Jesus Christ. But he didn’t like it because he was an atheist and his goal was to look like a Viking chief. So he started to dress himself like this, with homemade clothes and a horn helmet. It was at this moment that the people started to call him “the Viking of the Sixth Avenue ”. 

He lived for 30 years in New York, sometimes at hostels, sometimes in the street, and sometimes at his friends’ houses. He became friends with a lot of great American musicians and the New York musical scene knew him as a great musician. But he decided all his life to stay a marginal guy. He composed many musical scores, for all kinds of instruments and all kinds of orchestras, and everything in Braille. He was able to create so many different kinds of music, play many different instruments (especially percussion, and homemade instruments), and sing. His compositions are known to be pretty complex, to be written in the same way as the classical composers like Bach or Mozart, and to be minimal classical music, avant-garde jazz, and American neoclassical music. But just a few of them were recorded. In 1967, Janis Joplin made a cover of one of his songs. This was a huge publicity for his work and made him again more famous. But he was, during his life, known only by musicians and insiders, not by the general public. 

During the last part of his life, he lived in Germany. In 1974, he was invited to play his music during a concert in Frankfurt. He decided to never come back to America. He felt better in Europe, especially in Germany, the lands of his greatest idols, the classical German composers. He felt himself more intellectually close to Europe and he met his wife here, a German music student. She hosted him at her parents’ house in Münster, where he lived for the rest of his life. He continued to publish different albums in Germany and Europe and became more famous. He died in 1999 in Münster at the age of 83 years, after writing several hundreds of songs, musical scores and symphony. It was after his death that he became very famous and is known today as the father of “minimal music” and one of the leading figures of American classical music.

This article is a pretty short report of his life, which is really more full than what I told you. So, I invite you to go to find out more about him because his life is even more incredible than a movie and so many crazy things happened. And above all, I invite you to go to listen to his music, his songs are amazing and inspiring for contemporary music, because he inspired, and to this day is still inspiring so many famous musicians of our time. 

Augustin Magaud

Sources:

Moondog – Wikipedia.fr – 10/05/2024
Louis “Moondog” Hardin : 10 (petites) choses que vous ne savez (peut-être) pas sur le Viking de la 6e Avenue – Radiofrance.fr – Léopold Tobisch – 12/09/2018
Moondog, le ménestrel de la musique contemporaine – neosphere.free.fr – Eric Deshayes