Remembering Rod Moag, academic, musician, and the Pickin' Singin' Professor.
: “I'm not the kind of scholar who likes spending endless hours in the dusty back reaches of a library somewhere.”
The blind school gave him the skills to thrive in a sighted world and his only formal musical training. At school he learned piano and played in the dance band, but his abiding passion was the country music he heard on the radio and the secondhand Victrola phonograph that his father, a store clerk and later a dairy worker, brought home when he was 7 years old. Soon Rod was playing along on guitar, mandolin, fiddle, and any other instrument close to hand.
He soon landed a Fulbright scholarship to study the Hindi language in India, where he met and married his first wife, Rachel Lileet-Foley, also a Fulbright scholar. Their return home took them by ship to Mozambique, by thumb to Johannesburg, and then hopscotching up the African continent to Egypt, Israel. They traveled all through Europe in a blue 1963 Volkswagen Beetle they bought factory-new in Germany, which they then shipped to New York and drove to Madison to continue their studies.
Rod Moag, left, celebrating an album release with Mark Rubin, Johnny Gimble on fiddle, and Bill Dessens on pedal steel
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