I’m not the kind of
scholar who likes spending endless hours in the dusty back reaches of a librarysomewhere,” says Rod Moag. No, he’s the kind of scholar who likes spending
endless hours in the smoky back reaches of pool halls, bars, and rib joints,
pickin’ his mandolin and singin’ old country music. You see, Rod Moag is the
Pickin’ Singin’ Professor. And he’s blind.
During the day, Dr. Rodney Moag, Associate Professor of South Asian Languages,
teaches Hindi and Malayalam at the University of Texas at Austin. His office is
tucked in a corner of the fifth floor of the Will C. Hogg building. When the
sun sets, the shadow of the UT Tower envelops the Hogg building like the warm
afterglow of a tequila sunrise. Dr. Moag has taught here for the last eight
years.
But after hours, Moag sheds the mild-mannered guise of linguistics teacher and
becomes a one-man jukebox. The languages he teaches are bluegrass, country,
western swing, pop, rockabilly, and whatever else he can pull out of his
mortarboard. His lectures rarely last longer than five minutes, he never gives
homework, and the only test comes straight off The Tonight Show. Your
chances of winning “Stump the Band” with Moag are slimmer than Doc Severinsen
wearing something that didn’t elicit a double-take from Johnny Carson.
Moag knew he wanted to be a musician early on — when he was five years old.
His grandfather, who owned a second-hand furniture store, gave him his first
guitar. He started playing piano at age eight at the school for the blind in
his native state of New York. He would soon switch to the family of stringed
instruments (all of them — Moag plays electric and acoustic guitar, lap steel,
banjo, fiddle, and mandolin), and for good reason.
“The [piano] teacher used to say that she’d like to be a mouse in my practice
room to find out what I was doing, because I didn’t progress very rapidly,”
says Moag. “Part of the reason I didn’t progress faster on the piano was that
instead of practicing the music they assigned me, I was always fooling around
with tunes that I heard.”
And there were plenty. The radio was to the young Moag what NBA Jam, Mortal
Kombat, or the Power Rangers are to today’s youth. Local musicians played
on the radio all the time (“some were pretty good; some were pretty poor”),
plus there was WSM’s Grand Ole Opry and the National Barn Dance out of Chicago. After graduating high school, where he played trumpet in the
school dance band and orchestra (learning pop standards that gave him a special
affinity for Willie Nelson’s Stardust album), Moag continued his affair
with the radio, studying broadcasting at Syracuse University. Of course he was
also an active musician, part of a band that would go out and play dances in
the country. His bluegrass outfit could usually find work, because, as he says,
“There weren’t that many people in Western New York at the time who were
playing it.”
The triad of music, radio, and academia stuck with Moag at Syracuse, and has
followed him ever since. It went with him through graduate school at the
University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he received his Ph.D. in linguistics
while performing with the Bluegrass Hoppers in his spare time. The Hoppers
recorded a well-received album, and Moag also cut a single which “got a fair
amount of radio play.”
Meanwhile, Moag’s extensive travels led him to India, Missouri, Fiji,
Michigan, and in 1988, finally to Austin. Since then, he’s established himself
not only as a distinguished professor at a big-time university, but as a
fixture on the local country/bluegrass scene who’s willing to try anything in
his live act, especially at a lakeside joint called Ski Shores. “We do this
thing I call my `Dock Walk,’ where we kick a number off and I jump down off the
stage and walk back,” he says. “It’s a long dock, and I stroll back along the
dock, and I usually end up standing up on the table way back at the end of the
dock. I play my last chorus back there.”
Except for one rather memorable night.
“There’s a friend of ours who lives on the other side of the lake so he
usually comes across in his boat,” says Moag, a fond smile lighting up his
good-natured face. “One night, I had him pull up in his boat and instead of
strolling down the dock, I jumped off into his boat and we cruised out into the
lake about 100 feet. He had a big flashlight that he held on me like a
spotlight, and I played from out there. We’re trying to figure out what we have
to do to top that. I’ve thought about a parachute jump.”
When he’s not mulling over what a chorus of “Rose of the Alamo” would sound
like at 35,000 feet, Moag is either behind a podium or a microphone. You know
about the podium part. But did you know about the not one, but two, shows on
KOOP, 91.7-FM he hosts? First there’s “Country, Swing, and Rockabilly
Jamboree,” which airs Thursdays mornings from 9-11. That show’s all his. On the
second, “Strictly Bluegrass,” Moag’s one of three alternating hosts for the
Sunday morning show. Just like when he’s on stage, being behind the radio
console lets Moag connect with his audience.
“The times that I enjoy the most in radio are when you’re all alone and you
can really focus on the listener out there,” he says. “Radio is a very intimate
kind of medium in that people are listening either individually or in small
groups, so you can talk pretty directly to people.”
And, as if all this weren’t enough, Moag also cut an album last year, The
Pickin’ Singin’ Professor, a one man’s musical tour de force. It ain’t
every album that contains country chestnuts like “Give Me Forty Acres,” “Won’t
You Ride in My Little Red Wagon,” and “I Overlooked an Orchid,” or Buddy Knox’s
rockabilly classic “Party Doll;” and that other Buddy’s “Rave On” and
“Every Day” — not to mention the traditional Irish number “Galway Bay,” Ernest
Tubb’s “Mean Ol’ Bedbug Blues;” and several Moag originals. Get the picture?
Moag hopes so. In fact, when one of his friends told him “They won’t know how
to market it. They won’t know how to classify it,” in true Austin tradition, he
didn’t mind.
“When I put the album together, I was thinking more in terms of doing a
portrait album that showed some of the various things I like to do and feel
that I can do,” he says. And yes, he does know how to market it, too. Moag’s
currently trying to nail down a deal with a national distributor, and is
working on a press kit with an eye toward American radio. Appropriate, since
maybe the only two things more American than Rod Moag and his repertoire may be
gingham quilts and hot apple pie.
Yes, indeed, life is good for the Pickin’ Singin’ Professor. But how does he
do it? What’s the secret to maintaining such a finely tuned balance between the
staunch, stoic air of academia and the get-down, whoop-it-up, good-timin’ of
his after-hours pursuits? Is it magic? Zen? Does the man have super powers?
Just what is the deal?
Moag’s very forthcoming about the answer, act-ually. “I just try to get a nap
in between,” he says.n
Christopher Gray is currently a student at the University of Texas at
Austin. He wishes all his professors were half as cool as the one who picks and
sings.
This article appears in February 16 • 1996 and February 16 • 1996 (Cover).