STAMPING GROUND

Louis Thomas Hardin (1916-1999), known to the world as Moondog, was a maverick composer, poet, and street musician who's work transcends labels and redefines the distinction between popular and high culture. Born in Marysville, Kansas, he spent part of his childhood in Wyoming, where as a young boy he attended an Arapaho Sun Dance and, on the lap of Chief Yellow Calf, played a buffalo skin tom-tom, a rhythmic seed that would reappear in his later work. At sixteen, a dynamite accident left him permanently blind. He studied music at the Iowa School for the Blind, teaching himself music theory from Braille books and determining chord structures by ear.

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In 1943, he arrived in New York with little more than one month's rent. For the next three decades, he became a cultural fixture on 54th Street, performing his own compositions on homemade drums and reciting poetry while dressed in a Viking helmet and handcrafted robes.

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His earliest compositions were highly percussive, steeped in jazz and Latin idioms, yet he always considered himself a classicist. By the 1960s, he had become perhaps the most photographed street figure of his time. Charlie Parker admired him, Janis Joplin recorded his canon "All Is Loneliness", his music appeared in films and commercials. Philip Glass and Steve Reich hailed him as the godfather of minimalism, though Moondog deflected: "Bach was doing minimal in his fugues. So what's new?"

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In 1969, Columbia Records released Moondog on its Masterworks series—the closest he came to stardom in America. In 1974, he relocated to Germany, where he remained until his death in 1999, recording more albums than in any other period and performing across Europe.