In the popular mythology the American
folk music scene passed from the hills of Appalachia and Mississippi
Delta cotton fields to Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, The Almanacs, and The
Weavers and then, after an interim of nearly a decade was transmitted
by the dying Guthrie and lanky sage Pete Seeger directly to the new avatars—Peter,
Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, et al. Usually left out
is the defiantly bohemian and countercultural scene of New
York’s Greenwich Village—often thought of as the exclusive home of
the Beats and Jazz—and the genial giant of a man who
helped create and nurture a that tradition but encouraged innovation
within it.
Dave Van Ronk was literally a towering figure in American folk
music but is almost unknown to all but the most hard core folkies.
There have been blips of renewed interest in him, all confined
to relatively rarified intellectual circles. First there was his
highly readable and entertaining posthumously published memoir, The
Mayor of McDougal Street which finished by his friend and fellow
folk singer Elijah Wald which was published in 2005. That, in
turn, inspired the 2013 film by Joel and Ethan Coen, Inside
Llewyn Davis. That film won praise for its portrayal of
the Greenwich Village scene, but criticism from Van Ronk’s friends
because the title character based on him was radically different
than the man himself.
He was born as David Kenneth Ritz
Van Ronk in Brooklyn on June 30, 1936. Despite his last name,
he had just enough Dutch genes to connect him viscerally to New York
back to its founding colonial era. Mostly he was Irish, a
descendent of the hordes of despised immigrants of the 19th
Century. His working class family had risen only moderately
and then were set back by the Great Depression. They moved to Queens
and put their son into the heavily Irish Holy Child Jesus Catholic
School. Despite or because of a keen intellect and inquiring
mind he dropped out of school before graduation.
By 17 he was on his own and drifted
to the Village, a very scruffy place in those days, but hospitable
to various fringes. He supported himself with odd jobs
like dishwashing and shipped out three times as a merchant
seaman. It was while hanging around the Village that he was exposed
to folk music at the weekly Sunday gatherings and sing-a-longs in
Washington Square Park. He was soon joining in with his own guitar,
learning a vast repertoire of songs and honing his skills
Van Ronk was already interested in
music, but not so much in the Big Band sound and crooners who
dominated the radio. Instead, he was instinctively drawn to music
of earlier eras. In 1949 he began singing in barber shop
quartets. When he became interested in the revival of traditional
New Orleans style jazz, he picked up the tenor banjola—an instrument
with the neck of a 5-string banjo and the body of a mandolin.
He was soon playing professionally around town in traditional
bands—popularly labeled Dixieland, a name disparaged by most of
its practitioners.
That inevitably led to an interest
in rag time, which he began to interpret on the guitar “as if it
were a piano.” He created guitar arrangement for rag
classics like St. Louis Tickle and Scott Joplin’s Maple
Leaf Rag which brought him as a solo act the Village coffee
house scene.
Van Ronk’s life and music really
changed when he discovered traditional blues while rifling through the platters
at a used record shop. The vitality of the music and its authenticity
immediately grabbed him. His most important influence was Rev.
Gary Davis, but he was also influenced by Furry Lewis, Mississippi John Hurt, and
Brownie McGee. Other white singers, including Seeger, had
dabbled in the blues, but Van Ronk was the first to inhabit the music
with complete naturalness. His deep, husky voice and
ability to wail were perfect. His respect for the music was
total.
By the late
‘50’s Van Ronk was already the leading figure in the somewhat provincial
world of Village folk music. Although blues were a particular forte,
his performances were filled with all kinds of genre-busting music—those
pure old Appalachian Childe Ballads, sea shanties, work songs,
jazz, old time popular and vaudeville music, and topical ballads.
He mastered them all. He even had a record deal with Folkways
which guaranteed a bit of prestige but not big selling popular
success.
He had
established residence in the rambling apartment on Sheridan Square where
he lived for the rest of his life. It was open to all his many friends
for jams or a place to crash on the couch which hosted
many notable, including Dylan for most of his first year in New York.
When he wasn’t playing in coffee houses, he sat in the audience to
support his friends or hung out drinking Tullamore Dew and playing the raconteur
with the customers at saloons like McSorley’s.
His appetite for all things, food, drink, women, life itself was insatiable.
Van Ronk was
also curious. Despite his lack of formal education, he read widely,
deeply, and seriously. He was interested, naturally, in history,
but he also taught himself to be a gourmet cook, collected native art
from New Guinea and the Pacific Northwest. He enjoyed science
fiction and even contributed his own original stories to fanzines
later in life. Many thought that they were good enough to have found a
more professional home.
Radical, even revolutionary politics
was a particular passion. He shunned the doctrinaire Communists and
former Communists who had long dominated the Village radicalism. On one
hand he was offended by their slavish attachment to the Moscow
line of the moment on the other hand he found them both stodgy and
rendered timid by the traumas of the Red Scare. For
a while his friend Roy Berkley, the Trotskyite Troubadour,
brought him into the orbit of the American Committee for the Fourth
International (ACFI), later renamed the Workers League, dissident
Trotskyite sect.
But Van Ronk
was at heart an anarchist and a syndicalist. He
became active in and a leading member of the Libertarian League—not to
be confused with the current right wing use of the word with anarchist
luminaries like Sam Dolgoff and Murray Bookchin. The
Libertarian League promoted “equal freedom for all in a free
socialist society.” Dolgoff introduced him to the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), the famed but then faded revolutionary
union. He took out a Red Card and became prominent among
younger members in the New York Branch. In 1959 he and fellow Wobbly
Richard Ellington collaborated on the fabled satire, The Boss’s
Song Book. Van Ronk kept up his IWW dues for the rest of
his life.
In the ‘60’s
and after he performed at numerous benefits for the peace movement and
civil rights, but his anarchism was not welcomed by some elders and
caused friction with others, including Pete Seeger with whom he was sometimes at
odds and never close to despite their similar interests. In one of
his most famous activist moments, Van Ronk helped Phil Ochs organize the
1974 An Evening for Salvador Allende to protest the bloody coup
d’état that overthrew and killed the Socialist Chilean President.
At the end of
the ‘60’s groups like the Kingston Trio and the Chad Mitchell Trio
emerged out of college campuses and began selling records like rock
stars. That drew the attention of major labels to the Village
folk scene in search of new talents, and in turn lured youngsters from across
the country—and Canada—to try their hand in the scruffy coffee houses
and clubs. Van Ronk welcomed them and mentored them, most famously Bob
Dylan. Despite the mythology of the extremely ill Woody Guthrie passing
his baton to the kid from Minnesota, Van Ronk was his real mentor,
friend, and promoter. He likewise helped Ochs, Tom Paxton, and
Joni Mitchell. Up in Cambridge teenage Joan Baez idolized
him. All these people, and other friends went on to greater popular
success. Van Ronk did not begrudge them but did wish that he could do the
same. He moved to the more pop oriented Verve label and his
albums sold modestly, but steadily. He was held back by his reluctance to
long leave his beloved Village, which by this time had bestowed the unofficial
title of the Mayor of McDougal Street. He might dash off for a
weekend festival or for a quick trip up to Cambridge and Boston, but he
would not, for the most part, tour extensively, which was necessary to
bring his music to a wider audience.
Once, when Chicago,
was making its bid to be a second front for folk music, Van Ronk
took his famous trip to the Windy City to audition at the famous Gate
of Horn where Bob Gibson, Hamilton Camp, Josh White, and
others were making their mark. Inexplicably, the club turned him down, a
bitter disappointment. The experience became a central part of the
Coen Brother’s film.
Van Ronk often
seemed to have just plain bad luck, narrowly missing opportunities
to break out into national stardom. In 1961 he was the first choice of manager
Albert Grossman for the folk/pop trio he was trying to put
together Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers. But Grossman
decided that Van Ronk was too idiosyncratic, independent, and his
voice not sweet enough for the sound he envision. Instead, Noel
Stookey became Paul.
His pal Bob
Dylan recorded his arrangement of the old New Orleans blues House of the
Rising Sun without his permission and before he could record it
himself. He saw the same arrangement become a huge hit for The
Animals. Dylan’s casual betrayal temporarily cooled their
relationship, although they reconciled.
In 1964 was
asked to form a jug band to cash in on the popularity of Jim Kweskin and
enlisted some of the best and most versatile pickers in the city for the
project including, Sam Charters, Barry Kornfield, Artie Rose,
and Danny Kalb. Despite the talented line up and glowing reviews
Dave Van Ronk and the Ragtime Jug Stompers failed to become a hit.
It was not Van Ronk’s last stab at a band. In 1967 with Kornfield this time as producer he formed an electric—and eclectic—folk
rock band called Dave van
Ronk and the Hudson Dusters. The song selection was all over the
place—the kitschy ‘50’s novelty rock song Ally Oop, Jimmy Van Heusen’s Swing on a Star, Dink’s Song
as
collected and arranged by Bess and Allen Lomax, and
Rev. Gary Davis’s Cocaine. But the album also contained versions
of two songs by a young favorite—Joni Mitchell—Chelsea Morning and
Both Sides Now, which Van Ronk had renamed, to Mitchell’s
displeasure Clouds. She had not yet recorded either song
and was herself not well known. Despite her resentment over the title
switch, Mitchell always said that the cut on this record was her favorite version of her most iconic song. Once again, critics were
impressed and the album sold moderately well, but did not break out. The
band dissolved, Verve dropped him, and Van Ronk returned to solo work.
He did not issue another album until 1971, the
simply titled Van Ronk for Polydor. This album
included more Mitchell, Leonard Cohn’s Bird on the Wire, Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Going to Rain Today, Jacques Brell’s the Port of
Amsterdam, Bertolt
Brecht’s Legend of the Dead Soldier, as well as two rare—for him—original
songs. It was a moody, moving masterpiece growled with deep
emotion that ended with the ironic choice of Johnny Mercer’s and Harold
Arlen’s Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive. Another critical darling that the public didn’t get.
On last near miss was his
discovery of the song The Gambler by country music songwriter
Don Schlitz. He recognized it as
a potential hit. But his new label, Philo, was both dedicated to a hard core folk
audience and unwilling to promote a single. Van Ronk had
to take a pass. In 1979, of course Kenny Rogers—previously a mid-pack country singer—broke out to superstardom and a #1 hit on three Billboard Charts.
By this time, the Folk revival had long petered out. Many
of his friends and the musicians he had mentored left the Village for Woodstock, California, and Nashville. Van Ronk,
viscerally attached to the city and Village, refused to follow them. He
remained the Mayor of McDougal Street, but it was not the same.
On the eve of his birthday, June 28, 1969, Van Ronk was drinking with
friends when he went outside the bar to find out what kind of disturbance was going on. He found police
and the Gay patrons of the Stonewall Inn in a near pitch battle following a vice
raid. Ever ready to lend a hand to the underdog and oppressed, he joined the melee. A towering, burly man with a leonine
head of hair and shaggy
beard, he became a target for the cops who overpowered him and dragged him inside the Inn to be arrested. He was charged
with throwing a rock at police, which he denied. He was one of 13
arrested on the first night of the rebellion which became the rallying cry of the Gay Liberation Movement.
Van Ronk lived with Terri Thal for 11 years,
the last 7 as husband and wife after they met in 1957.
She became his manager and accomplice, and was the
first manager for Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton and others. After they parted on amicable terms, he had another long term relationship
before marrying Andrea Vuocolo in 1988. They remained
devoted the rest of his life.
Despite waning
fame, and eventually health problems, Van Ronk never really
retired. He continued to perform where he could and made more
albums. He had a small but devoted following. Old friends like
Dylan would occasionally visit his old apartment. His last public concert
was in Atlanta, not New York City, a few months before his death.
Van Ronk in Utah Phillips’ clown nose at the Parting Glass in Saratoga Springs, NY, after Lena Spencer’s 1989 memorial service. With Anna McGarrigle, Phillips, and Roy Bookbinder.
On February 10,
2002, he died of heart failure in a New York City hospital following
surgery for colon cancer.
Two years later
in perhaps the tribute that would have meant the most to him, the block the
street in front of his long-time apartment was officially named Dave
Van Ronk Street.
