Graeme Thomson on Tim Hardin, the influential but forgotten purveyor of folk pop.
"Bob Dylan once called him “the greatest songwriter alive” and Joe Strummer regarded him as a “lost genius of music”. Yet when Tim Hardin died in 1980, aged just 39, the world barely raised an eyebrow.
His best known songs, If I Were a Carpenter and Reason to Believe, have been covered by a veritable Who’s Who of artists, among them Johnny Cash, Robert Plant, Rod Stewart and Joan Baez. Several more of his songs have been recorded by the likes of Paul Weller, the Byrds and Echo and the Bunnymen. Whatever the era, whatever the genre, Hardin has always somehow connected."
