Country Doctor

I'm not the kind of

scholar who likes spending endless hours in the dusty back reaches of a library somewhere," 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.