An American composer, musician and poet, who also invented musical instruments - all this despite being blind and, for three decades, homeless.
Born in Marysville, Kansas, he started playing a set of drums that he made himself from a cardboard box at the age of five.
Hardin was blinded in a farm accident at the age of 16. After learning the principles of music in several schools for blind young men across middle America, he taught himself the skills of ear training and composition. He had a particular interest in Native American music.
From the late 1940s until 1974, Moondog lived as a street musician and poet in New York City, busking mostly on 53rd Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. In addition to his music and poetry, he was also known for the distinctive Viking garb that he wore, which included a horned helmet. He partially supported himself by selling copies of his poetry and his musical philosophy. Because of his street post's proximity to the famed 52nd Street nightclub strip, he was well-known to many jazz musicians and fans.
Moondog's work was early championed by Artur Rodzinski, the conductor of New York Philharmonic in the 1940s. He released a number of 78s, 45s and EPs of his music in the 1950s, as well as several LPs on a number of notable jazz labels, including an unusual record of stories for children with actress Julie Andrews in 1957.
For 10 years no new recordings were heard from Moondog until producer James William Guercio took him into the studio to record an album for Columbia Records in 1969. The track Stamping Ground, with its odd preamble of Moondog saying one of his epigrams], was featured on the sampler double album Fill Your Head with Rock (1970).
A second album produced with Guercio featured Moondog's daughter as a vocalist and contained song compositions in canons and rounds, but did not make as large an impression in popular music as the first album. The two Columbia albums were re-released as a single CD in 1989.
In a search for new sounds, Moondog also invented several musical instruments, such as the oo, a small triangular shaped harp, the ooo-ya-tsu and the trimba, a triangular percussion instrument invented in the late 1940s. The original trimba is still played today by Stefan Lakatos, a Swedish percussionist, close friend and pupil of Moondog, who Moondog had taught how to build the instrument.
Moondog had an idealised view of Germany, where he settled in 1974 and spent the remainder of his life. Moondog visited America briefly in 1989 for a tribute in which Phillip Glass asked him to conduct the Brooklyn Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra at the New Music America Festival in Brooklyn, stimulating a renewed interest in his music. He recorded many albums, and toured both in the US and in Europe.