Tim Hardin is one of the most covered songwriters of the 1960s and one of the least discussed in proportion to his importance. If I Were a Carpenter became a standard before Hardin was thirty. Bobby Darin had a top-ten hit with it. Joan Baez recorded it. Rod Stewart recorded it. The Four Tops recorded it. The song became, through these covers, something more visible than its author.

Hardin himself was from Eugene, Oregon. He grew up in a family with Native American ancestry on his mother’s side. He was in the Marines in the early 1960s, stationed for a period in Southeast Asia, and came back with a heroin habit that would define and eventually end his adult life. He moved to New York and began playing in the folk clubs. He started recording for Verve Records in 1966.

The records

Tim Hardin 1 was released in 1966. The record is a set of folk and blues-influenced songs recorded with a small ensemble. The production is spare. Hardin’s voice sits at the centre of everything. It is a voice that sounds like it is always slightly held back, as if the full force of the emotion behind the song is being controlled rather than expressed. The control is not coldness. It is the opposite of coldness. It is the sound of someone trying not to break.

Tim Hardin 2 followed in 1967. The songwriting on the second album is, if anything, stronger than the first. Red Balloon, Lady Came from Baltimore, Don’t Make Promises: these are fully formed songs with the kind of melodic and lyrical integrity that most songwriters do not achieve in a full career.

Suite for Susan Moore and Damion, released in 1969, is Hardin’s most ambitious record and the one least well known. It is a song cycle, structured as a suite, about love and domestic life and the difficulty of both. The orchestrations are by Harry Lookofsky. The result is something that did not fit any available category in 1969 and still does not fit neatly.

The twang thread

The Goes Twang format at this site is a listening essay that traces the country, folk, and traditional roots underneath a given artist’s work. For Hardin, the tracing is not difficult. The roots are on the surface.

He was a folk performer before he became a songwriter. The first records he made were in a folk context. The country thread in his work is structural rather than decorative: the chord movements, the song forms, the relationship between voice and instrument. These come from the tradition rather than from a pop songwriting context.

The blues influence is equally direct. Hardin talked about Robert Johnson and Leadbelly as primary influences. The blue notes in his vocal phrasing, the way he approached the melismatic passages in certain songs, the chord progressions that dip into blues form and out again: these are not decorative references. They are the material.

The later career

After the first four records, Hardin’s output became irregular. The addiction complications that his early biography flags became more acute. He performed at Woodstock in 1969 — one of the early acts, before the crowd had fully assembled — and the performance is preserved in some of the documentary footage, though not in the theatrical release of the Woodstock film.

He moved to England in the 1970s and made records there with British musicians. The records from this period are uneven. Some of them are very good. All of them are underheard.

He died in December 1980 in Los Angeles, aged thirty-nine. The cause of death was a heroin and morphine overdose. He left behind a body of work, concentrated in the first three studio records, that is among the most significant and most overlooked in American roots music.

The listening essay

The sequence for a Tim Hardin Goes Twang listening essay moves from the most country-adjacent recordings toward the most personal. It does not follow the album sequence. It follows the thread.

It starts with Reason to Believe, the song that Rod Stewart would make famous. Hardin’s own version is quieter and more interior than Stewart’s. It starts with one voice and one guitar and stays close to those elements. The emotion in the recording is not performed. It is the sound of someone who means what he is saying.

It moves through the ballads of the second album, through the country-blues pieces on the first, into the Suite, and ends with one of the late-career recordings that captures something the early fame and the later difficulty could not obscure: the fact that Hardin was a genuinely original songwriter working in a tradition that he understood from the inside.

The Mixtapes index at this site has the full Goes Twang series: Mixtapes. The Americana roots primer has broader context: American Roots Music Primer.