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NOVEMBER, 2003
Who knows how they all came together. Chalk it up to strange grace or some rarefied stroke of fortune. If you ask them, you're liable to get six different stories. And they'll probably all bear some small resemblance to the real way it all went down, but make no mistake, that tale is long lost.
Sometimes, particularly in the minds of those prone to wander, memories like that, once fluid in their recall, just slowly blend into the deep patchwork of the brain. And to be sure, all of these boys have lived the wandering life.
JON HARDY
Jon Hardy is the son of a traveling holiness preacher. His father's fevered zeal to call souls to repentance kept the family in constant motion, and as such, Hardy can't really claim any one place in this land as his home. He made his way onto the sanctuary stages while still a toddler, first to rattle along on the tambourine, and not long after to revile against the fire and brimstone of hell. He baptized his first believer at age 12.
It was a southern woman that eventually pulled him away from the preaching life, but don't bother asking him about it. The relationship was short-lived, and its collapse sent Hardy into the two-lane honky tonks and hardscrabble gambling rooms he'd once admonished against with ferocity. If there is such a thing as earnest wandering, Hardy did it during these years. This, of course, is when he began writing songs.
Penniless, he went wherever folks were willing to take him, often sleeping on riverbanks or under bridges when he found no other shelter. He now laughingly recalls sleeping on the banks of the Ohio in the eastern U.S. and the banks of the Guadiana in Spain within a span of seven months.
He met his wife, Suzanne, during a stint as a short-order cook at a Waffle House in Defiance, Missouri. She was a waitress, and her simple kindnesses to him were a restorative salve to his faith and hope. She has inhabited many of his songs, if sometimes only in single words or short phrases. Sadly, life with a full-hearted sayer became too much for Hardy's woman. A number of years back she told him that she was leaving for the arms of a more noticeable man.
