Glen's Photo Montage
This site is a tribute to a great man Mr Glen D Hardin. There did not appear to be a myspace for such a great man, so I decided to make Mr Hardin one.
I met Glen in Sheffield a few years ago, we supported The Crickets. Glen was and is such a kind and pleasant person, and what a fantastic musician and composer/arranger! Brian.
Glen D. Hardin has enjoyed a long career in rock & roll and country music, playing behind some of the most prominent music stars of the 1970s,1980s and 1990’s. Born in Wellington, Texas in 1939, he was in his mid-teens as country music began its transformation into rock & roll, and he got to see performers such as Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly during their early, pre-stardom days. His own interest lay more with playing than singing – he learned guitar at a professional level but became truly proficient on the piano.
Glen D. grew up in Texas and discovered the new music scene in Los Angeles in 1961, after leaving the army. Less than a few months later, he was the regular piano player at the worldwide known Palomino Club.
Mr Hardin's first major gig came that same year, 1961, when he became a member of the Crickets, the Texas-spawned band founded by Buddy Holly and led by drummer Jerry Allison in the wake of Holly's death. Glen played piano on the singles My Little Girl and La Bamba, and on their album California Sun; additionally, after Joe B. Mauldin left the group, Hardin furnished their bass sound with a Fender Rhodes piano bass. He also wrote songs with Crickets guitarist/singer Sonny Curtis, co-authoring the group's single Teardrops Feel Like Rain, and the songs Count Me In, My Heart's Symphony, and Where Will the Word Come From, recorded by their fellow Liberty Records artists Gary Lewis & the Playboys.
During the second half of the 1960s, Glen D. Hardin kept busy and highly visible as a member of the Shindogs, the house band on the weekly ABC rock & roll showcase series Shindig, which had been put together by Leon Russell and included James Burton as leader and lead guitarist. He also played on records by Merle Haggard and Hamilton Camp. It was through Russell that Hardin played on records for Delaney Bramlett and, in tandem with Burton that, in 1970, he started working with Elvis Presley. Glen D. wasn’t the original piano player in the TCB Band, as he replaced Larry Muhoberac who quit in 1970.
Although he also played in the country-rock band Swampwater, and did sessions with everyone from Dean Martin to Gram Parsons, Bing Crosby, George Jones and Linda Ronstadt during this period, Glen Hardin's most important and long-lasting seventies gig was with Elvis, at the core of his live and studio performances from 1970 through 1976, a period in which Hardin also wrote arrangements for Elvis – with the outstanding arrangement for Bridge Over Troubled Water as fine example. He played on the live performances and studio tracks that comprised the bulk of Elvis Presley's comeback legacy, and quit in 1976.
Glen jumped right in to Emmylou Harris' backing group, the Hot Band, remaining with her into the 1980s, in addition to playing on records and tours by Michael Nesmith, Hoyt Axton, John Denver, Roy Orbison, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, d.d. Lang, Tina Turner, Tammy Wynette, Marty Stuart, Vince Gill, Trisha Yearwood, Tanya Tucker and Chris Hillman, among others. In recent years, in addition to playing with the Crickets on-stage, he has been playing as a backup musician to Elvis once again, as corner stone of the live band in the stage entertainment show "Elvis the Concert."
Glen D. still lives in Nashville, where he works as a full time studio musician. A while ago, he recorded with Ray Price, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard.
Video Footage of Glen