Harry Chapin
Singer, songwriter, story-teller, fundraiser,
one of the guys with the 'live eyes, live hearts and live minds'

1942 - 1981

I never met Harry Chapin. I never spoke to him on the phone. Never even wrote to him. And yet, when he was killed in 1981, I felt as if I had lost a friend. Even more surprisingly, I have met and spoken with other people who have said the same thing. That Harry, through his songs, became a part of their lives.

In fact, so many people say the same things about him, that it's hard to write about him without it sounding like a special kind of Harry Chapin cliché. But it's true. He had an incredible knack for taking those experiences, thoughts and feelings we all thought were unique to us, and capturing them in a song so utterly perfectly that you feel he must have been looking into your mind.

Although I bought all of his albums, I knew nothing about him beyond the contents of his songs, and it was not until several years after his death that I learned of his work for ending hunger. It was a real pleasure to discover that we had, unbeknown to me, shared this in common, albeit on rather different scales!

There's little point in trying to communicate what it is so many people find special about Harry's music without listening to it, so I'll content myself with recommending a few albums. My personal favourite is Heads and Tales, on which I love every track. But Legends of the Lost and Found is a must for the tracks Stranger With the Melodies and You Are the Only Song.

Some albums are only available on tape, but an increasing number are being re-released on CD. All, however, are imports, so be prepared to pay a premium. Best value has to be the double-CD compilation, The Gold Medal Collection. You'll need to visit the larger record stores to find any Chapin, and even then you'll usually only find a small selection, but any store will order tapes and CDs for you.

Thanks to Steve Gibbons, you can listen to a few brief excerpts of some of my favourites:

Taxi
Any Old Kind of Day
Everybody's Lonely
Empty

More of these are available at http://www.harryitsucks.com (a Harry Chapin in-joke ...).

And links to a few Harry Chapin websites.

A brief biography of Harry

An archive of Harry Chapin documents

Some of his song lyrics

World Hunger Year -- the charity he founded

Finally, if you'd like to visit his grave on Long Island, you can find directions and photos here. It's about an hour from Manhattan.