Jack Hardy (singer-songwriter)

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Jack Studebaker Hardy is a lyrical singer-songwriter and playwright based in Greenwich Village who has been influential in the North American and European folk music scenes for decades. He has been cited as a major influence by Suzanne Vega and many others who emerged from that scene in the 1980s. He was also the founder of the Songwriters' Exchange at the Cornelia Street Cafe and was the founder and first editor of Fast Folk Musical Magazine. Hardy is a graduate of the Pomfret School in Connecticut.

Although more popular in Europe than in his native America for much of his career, Hardy has recently seen a reignited interest in his music, and tours regularly on both sides of the Atlantic. In songwriter circles, Hardy is as well-known as a teacher and mentor as he is as an artist. For more than thirty years, songwriters have gathered at his Hudson Street apartment one night a week to play their latest (and sometimes unfinished) work, and to face criticism from Hardy and their gathered peers. Fueled by pasta and wine, the weekly songwriter's sessions are famous for the artistic and political conversations that have flowed in them and the large number of remarkable songs that have emerged from them. (When the introduction to a new song gets too long and/or apologetic from a songwriter, Hardy is known to quip, "Shut up and sing the song.") The hundreds of songwriters who have frequented Hardy's apartment gatherings over the years includes names both unknown and famous -- among them, Suzanne Vega, Brian Rose, Richard Shindell, John Gorka, Wendy Beckerman, Richard Julian, Christian Bauman, Linda Sharar, Rod Macdonald, Lucy Kaplansky, and Christine Lavin. The weekly songwriter's session has itself made it into a number of songs by Hardy alumni, including "Jack's Crows" by John Gorka, the title song of Gorka's second album, and "Boulevardiers" by Suzanne Vega. The group has also more recently been immortalized in fictional form in Christian Bauman's 2008 novel "In Hoboken," which includes two chapters that take place in the Hudson Street apartment, and a character named "Geoff Mason" who bears a striking (and, according to a public radio interview with Bauman, intentional) resemblance to Hardy.

While Hardy's name has never achieved the level of fame of many of his adherent followers (e.g., John Gorka, David Wilcox, and The Roches), he has continued to build on his substantial catalog of literate, well-crafted songs for several decades and is doggedly beloved by the folk fans who have followed his career.