Tim Hardin
Hardin in 1969
Background information
Birth name	James Timothy Hardin
Born	(1941-12-23)December 23, 1941 Eugene, Oregon, U.S.
Died	December 29, 1980(1980-12-29) (aged 39) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Genres	Folk
Occupation(s)	Singer, songwriter
Instrument(s)	Vocals, guitar, piano
Years active	1964–1980
Labels	Verve, Columbia

James Timothy Hardin (December 23, 1941 – December 29, 1980)^[1][2] was an American folk music and blues singer-songwriter and guitarist. In addition to his own popularity, several of his songs were hits for other artists including If I Were a Carpenter, Reason to Believe and Misty Roses. ^[3]

Hardin grew up in Oregon and had no interest in school. He dropped out before graduating and joined the Marine Corps. He started his music career in Greenwich Village and Cambridge which led to recording several albums in the mid to late 1960s with performances at the Newport Folk Festival and at Woodstock. He struggled with drug abuse throughout most of his adult life and his live performances were sometimes erratic. He was planning a comeback when he died in late 1980 from an accidental heroin overdose.

Hardin was born in Eugene, Oregon to Hal and Molly Hardin who both had musical backgrounds. His mother was an accomplished violinist and concertmaster of the Portland Symphony Orchestra and his father, who worked at his wife's family's mill, had played bass in jazz bands in the Army and in college.^[4][5]

It was at the South Eugene High School where Hardin first picked up the guitar. He dropped out at 18 to join the Marine Corps where he improved his guitar skills and built up a repertoire of folk songs. He also got a taste for heroin while stationed with them in Southeast Asia.^[6]

After his discharge, he moved to New York City in 1961 where he briefly attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.^[6] He was eventually excluded for poor attendance^[7] and began to focus on his musical career by performing around Greenwich Village playing folk music and blues. During this time, he became friends with fellow musicians "Mama Cass" Elliot, John Sebastian and Fred Neil.^[8]

He moved to Boston in 1963 and became part of a growing folk music scene there. He was discovered by upcoming record producer Erik Jacobsen (later the producer for The Lovin' Spoonful) who arranged a meeting at Columbia Records.^[9] The next year, he moved back to Greenwich Village to record for Columbia. He made a handful of demos as an audition which they did not release and they soon terminated his contract.^[10] Verve Forecast would release these tracks in 1969 as Tim Hardin 4 as though they were a newly recorded album.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1965, he met actress Susan Yardley Morss (known professionally as Susan Yardley)^[6][11] and moved back to New York with her. He signed to the Verve Forecast label and released his first album, Tim Hardin 1 in 1966 which contained "How Can We Hang On to a Dream", "Reason to Believe" and the touching ballad "Misty Roses" which got Top 40 radio play. That same year, he played at the Newport Folk Festival.

He was admired for his beautiful voice, "a soft voice, a sweet voice,” a Los Angeles Times reviewer later wrote, “a voice which quavers between the tugs of the blues and the tender side of joy. He can sing nasty, but his forte is gentle songs whose case allows him to slip and slide through a rainbow of emotions.”

“I think of myself more as a singer than a songwriter and always did,” he told a reporter in an interview with the Oregon Daily Emerald. “It happened to be that I wrote songs. I’m a jazz singer, really, writing in a different vocabulary mode but still with a jazz feel. I don’t ever sing one song the same way. I’m an improvisational singer and player.”

Tim Hardin 2 was released in 1967 and contained one of his most famous songs, "If I Were a Carpenter". That year, Atco, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records released an album of earlier material called This is Tim Hardin featuring covers of House of the Rising Sun, Fred Neil's Blues on the Ceiling and Willie Dixon's Hoochie Coochie Man plus several of his own songs including the driving, Fast Freight . The liner notes state that he recorded the songs in 1963–1964 well before the release of Tim Hardin 1. In 1968, Verve released Tim Hardin 3 Live in Concert, a collection of live recordings along with remakes of earlier songs. It was followed by Tim Hardin 4 which was his unreleased Columbia demos dating from the same period as This is Tim Hardin.

By 1967, after critical acclaim for his first album and the release of This is Tim Hardin, his songs were being widely covered and he was in demand to tour Europe and the United States. However, the quality of his work was in decline due in part to "his own combativeness in the studio, addiction to heroin, his drinking problems and his frustration over his lack of commercial success". He began to miss shows and performed poorly reputedly falling asleep on stage at London's Royal Albert Hall in 1968.^[5][12] At the time, he was viewed as enigmatic, with one journalist stating that while "his position as one of the best songwriters of his generation is unquestioned ... [he] ... courted the scene in the most fumbling manner imaginable". The same writer noted Hardin's ambivalent relationship with his audience, often ignoring them, just singing "at times badly, at times beautifully ... somehow always fascinating".^[13] It has been written that Hardin did have an "uninspired stage presence" in spite of having what the reporter said was "not a bad voice".^[14]. The tour was cut short after he contracted pleurisy.^[15]

In September of 1968, he and Van Morrison shared a bill at the Cafe Au Go Go each performing an acoustic set.^[16]. In 1969, he signed with Columbia again, recording three albums for them, Suite for Susan Moore and Damion: We Are One, One, All in One; Bird on a Wire; and Painted Head. He had one of his few commercial successes with a non-lp single, a cover of Bobby Darin's "Simple Song of Freedom" reaching number 48 on the US and Canadian Top 50 charts.^[17] Hardin did not tour in support of the single. His heroin use and stage fright made his live performances erratic.^[6]

That same year, he appeared at the Woodstock Festival where he sang If I Were a Carpenter solo and played a set of his songs backed by a full band.^[18]. He was scheduled to open the festival though he was in such bad shape that Richie Havens opened instead. None of his performances were included in the documentary film or the original soundtrack album.^[6] His performance of If I Were a Carpenter was included on the 1994 box set Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music.

During the years that followed, Hardin traveled between Britain and the U.S. In 1969, he arrived in England to start a program for heroin addiction but was unsuccessful and he became addicted to barbiturates which were used during the withdrawal stage from heroin.^[7] His heroin addiction had taken control of his life by the time his last album, Nine, was released on GM Records in the UK in 1973 (the album did not see a U.S. release until it appeared on Antilles Records in 1976). He sold the writers' rights to his songs but accounts of how this happened differ.^[6]

In late November 1975, Hardin performed as guest lead vocalist with the German experimental rock band Can for two UK concerts at Hatfield Polytechnic in Hertfordshire and at London's Drury Lane Theatre. According to author Rob Young, in the book All Gates Open: The Story of Can, Hardin and Can got into a huge argument after the London concert during which Hardin threw a television set through a car's windshield.^[19]

In early 1980, Hardin returned to the US after several years in Britain, wrote ten new songs and started recording them at home for a comeback. However, on December 29, his longtime friend, Ron Daniels found him dead on the floor of his Hollywood apartment. The police said there was no evidence of foul play and it appeared initially that the cause of death was a heart attack.^[20] The Los Angeles coroner's office later confirmed that Hardin had died of an accidental heroin overdose.^[21] He buried in Twin Oaks Cemetery in Turner, Oregon.^[22]

The following year, Columbia released his last work, eight unfinished tracks, on the posthumous album Unforgiven along with a compilation of his previous work for them, The Shock of Grace.^[23]

Hardin wrote the top 40 hit If I Were a Carpenter, covered by Bobby Darin, Bob Dylan, Bob Seger, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, the Four Tops, Robert Plant, Small Faces, Johnny Rivers, Bert Jansch, Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, Dolly Parton and Joe Nichols among others.

His song Reason to Believe was covered by many artists notably Neil Young, the Carpenters and Rod Stewart who had a chart hit with it.

How Can We Hang On to a Dream was covered many times including by Cliff Richard, Françoise Hardy, Marianne Faithfull, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, The Nice featuring Keith Emerson and Echo and the Bunnymen.

Morrissey and Nico covered Lenny's Tune, Bobby Darin and Johnny Cash both charted hits with The Lady Came From Baltimore and Johnny Mathis had a top 40 hit with Misty Roses.

In 2005, the indie rock band Okkervil River released a concept studio album called Black Sheep Boy said to be based on Hardin's life. According to one reviewer, the tribute album is a "collection that should go some way towards rekindling an interest in Hardin's life and work".^[24] Will Sheff from Okkervil River said "There is something very disarming about how simple those songs are ..., a Tim Hardin song never outstays its welcome. It's very short and pretty: one verse, one chorus, second verse, the song is over and he's out of there. It's like a tiny, perfectly cut gem".^[25]

In January of 2013, a tribute album, Reason to Believe:The Songs of Tim Hardin featuring indie and alternative rock bands from Britain and America was released. Mark Lanegan who sang Hardin'sRed Balloon on the album told Rolling Stone: "I've always been haunted by his devastating voice and beautiful songs ... I can't imagine anyone hearing him and not feeling the same".^[26] Another performer on the album, Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith said of Hardin that "you get what he’s telling you without him spelling it out ... when it came time to make my first record I can remember keeping that in mind".^[27] One music website initially described the album as appearing "surprisingly mainstream" but later acknowledged in the article as a "comprehensive package ... [that] ... transcends its limitations ... [with the folkier songs] ... capturing the fragility of Hardin's original work without disrupting the moody, maudlin flow".^[28] The album has been described as providing an opportunity to focus more on Hardin's music than his issues with drugs and his early death.^[29]

Roger Daltrey chose Hardin's song "How Can We Hang On to a Dream" for his commemorative CD of favorite music when he won the 2016 Music Industry Trusts Award for his services to music and charity noting in the CD track notes "I was a huge fan of Tim".^[30]

On his third solo album recorded in 2015, Pete Sando, previously of the 1960s band Gandalf, included a song called "Misty Roses on a Stone" that he co-wrote as a dedication to Hardin and after a visit to the singer's grave. He acknowledged that he was very influenced by Hardin noting in particular "his lyrical economy and musical balance ... just the sheer simplicity and beauty of his songs was so appealing".^[31]

Bob Dylan reportedly said that Hardin was "the greatest living songwriter" after hearing his first album.^[32] In a 1980 interview when asked about the Dylan quote, Hardin recalled: "Yeah, I played him part of the album one night and he started flipping out, you know. Man, he got down on his knees in front of me and said: 'Don't change your singing style and don't bleep 'a' blop...'".^[33] In the same interview, Hardin expressed some mixed feelings about Dylan but in another article, Brian Millar concluded [that] "Dylan was right: for some years, Tim Hardin was the greatest songwriter alive. And just as no one sang Dylan like Dylan, no one sings Hardin like Hardin".^[34] Hardin claimed to be either a distant relative of or direct descendant of John Wesley Hardin, a 19th century outlaw but this has been found to be part of his self-mythologising;^[35][36][4] it has been said that this provided the inspiration for Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.^[20][37]

After his death in 1980, there was considerable reflective journalism about his impact. It was reported that, along with Leonard Cohen, Hardin was the only musician who could rival Bob Dylan in composing "deeply moving love songs" however that critic also noted that Hardin never gained the attention he deserved and when found dead, not one of his albums was still in print.^[38] Jon Marlow writing in the Miami News said he was not about to "glorify yet another dead junkie's lifestyle" but held that the Tim Hardin Memorial album is an "unheralded but still beautiful record of 12 songs that deserve your attention and money ... and has nothing to do with dead-hero worship ... it's simply here to remind us that via his first two albums Tim Hardin made a lot of promises he couldn't keep".^[39] Another reviewer wrote of the memorial album that it "firmly establishes Hardin as an enduring and influential artist".^[40] The excesses of his lifestyle came under scrutiny and while it was never concluded whether he was a jazz rather than a folk artist, one reviewer noted that "few people who have never heard the poignant, often lonely, tone of [his] body of work would dispute the suggestion that he was one of the most affecting singer-songwriters of the modern pop era".^[41] The Los Angeles Weekly said' that Hardin's life showed drugs, alcohol and creativity were not a long lasting or positive partnership with the writer concluding: "I don't think Tim Hardin was ever really sure how good he was and he rocketed from arrogance to despair conscious of the promises he couldn't keep ... [he is] ... gone, but the songs aren't and they will last".^[42]

• Tim Hardin 1 (1966)
• Tim Hardin 2 (1967)
• This Is Tim Hardin (1967)
• Tim Hardin 3 Live in Concert (1968)
• Tim Hardin 4 (1969)
• Suite for Susan Moore and Damion: We Are One, One, All in One^[43] (1969)
• Bird on a Wire (1971)
• Painted Head (1972)
• Nine (1973)
• Unforgiven (1981)

• Tim Hardin at IMDb
• Tim Hardin at Find a Grave
• Detailed fan site
• Woodstock performance--If I Were a Carpenter
• Tim Hardin Review - Martin & Kingsbury