Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue

Step aside, Beethoven. Take a seat, Duke Ellington. Today we’re talking about Moondog — the blind, self-fashioned Viking who pounded the streets of Manhattan with a staff, a beard like a Norse god, and a mind full of music that defied every tidy label and genre box the 20th century tried to impose.

Born Louis Thomas Hardin in 1916, Moondog was a composer, poet, street performer, and proto-minimalist who saw music in traffic and poetry in pigeons. He lost his sight in a farming accident at age 16, which didn’t slow him down — it just refocused him. He went on to study music by ear, absorbing classical composition, jazz rhythms, and Native American drumming (he once sat in on a Sun Dance and was never quite the same).

In the 1940s, he moved to New York, where he became the city’s most mythic eccentric. Imagine this: a blind man dressed in full Viking regalia (helmet and all), standing on 6th Avenue, reciting cryptic epigrams, playing strange homemade instruments, and selling sheet music to curious pedestrians. He looked like he’d wandered out of a hallucinated opera… but the man was no sideshow. He was a genius.

You might’ve brushed past him without knowing that Leonard Bernstein dug his work, or that Charlie Parker used to stop and listen, or that Phillip Glass and Steve Reich cited him as a spiritual grandfather of minimalism. Moondog beat them to the punch, layering counterpoint rhythms long before it was cool in SoHo lofts. He called it “snaketime”—music that coils, curls, and never marches to a 4/4 beat just because you want it to.

His compositions blended classical structure with tribal rhythms, jazz freedom, and an uncanny melodic sense that seemed beamed in from another planet—or at least another century. He made music for string quartets, pipe organs, brass bands, and his own bizarre inventions like the “Oo” (a triangular harp of his own design). Oh, and let’s not forget his poetry, often sprinkled with philosophical zingers that would make Marcus Aurelius blink twice.

His street persona wasn’t just flair—it was philosophy. Moondog rejected the idea of living within society’s tightly stitched expectations. He lived independently, by choice, on the streets for decades. Not because he had to, but because he wanted the world on his terms. If that meant giving up a warm apartment to howl into the wind in front of a record store, so be it.

And yet, he wasn’t some aimless drifter. The man released albums (on labels like Columbia and Prestige!), had his music played by symphonies, and even hit the charts in Germany after he moved there in the ’70s. In Europe, he found recognition as a legitimate composer—without needing to trade his robe for a tux.

His music pulses with rhythm and ritual. It walks, it limps, it dances, it spirals. You don’t listen to Moondog; you encounter him. One moment you’re in a baroque cathedral, the next you’re in a medieval tavern with a swinging jazz trio, and suddenly a Native American flute cuts the air like an owl’s cry in a dream.

Want a taste? Try “Bird’s Lament” — his tribute to Charlie Parker, and a tune so catchy it’s been sampled by everyone from DJ Mr. Scruff to hip-hop producers digging for that offbeat gold. Or “All Is Loneliness,” which Janis Joplin famously wailed into psychedelic eternity. That song title? Pure Moondog. Simple. Inevitable. Heavy.

Moondog died in 1999, but he left behind a discography that still sounds like tomorrow’s music scribbled on ancient parchment. He was outsider art before the term got gentrified. He was minimalist before it was a movement. He was weird before weird became currency.

So next time you hear a car horn, a dog bark, a clattering garbage can—pause. That might be Moondog whispering through the noise, reminding you that music is everywhere, especially in the places you’re least expecting it.

Stay weird. Stay wild. Stay in snaketime.

🌀🐺🎵

—MadWonko (still listening for rhythms in the radiator)