The Folk Brothers

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #145 (January/February 2010).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

The Folk Brothers

Jacky Hardy and David Massengill

by Deborah Wilbrink

"The song is more important than the singer," Jack Hardy stated flatly. "We're trying to do what folk music should do. The repertoire of the traditional, songs by others, and gestalt. And no one made a big deal about who wrote them." When Hardy started singing in the 60s, "You learned songs from other singers. If you wrote one, you'd sneak it in edgewise and hope that no one noticed, that it would measure up. It was a good system. In the 60s no one was gonna get rich in folk. In the 70s the concept of the singer as the songwriter as a star came in -- fame and fortune -- and it drew a different type of person into folk music. It became an arm of pop music and commercially viable, got dumbed down politically and dumbed down intelligently, and that's not what I signed on for."

The Folk Brothers are two friends, stalwarts of the folk movement who only recently discovered some magical chemistry between their voices. They have known each other since the 1970s, played football together, gone to Yankees games together, and worked on the Fast Folk Musical Magazine together. But at Kerrville in 2008, Jack Hardy and David Massengill found new possibilities: They could harmonize -- formidably, gently, teasingly. Excited, they rehearsed every day for two weeks, then recorded an album, Partners in Crime, in four hours. Their harmonies have been compared to the Everly Brothers and to Simon & Garfunkel. Pure, fresh, folk. In performance, the Folk Brothers are riveting; you can't believe your ears, and your mind is delighted by the wordplay and notes.

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[cover #145]