“Back at Our Lady of Perpetual Bingo where I went to school, along
with the rack, thumbscrew, and bastinado, they has a curious custom
of announcing grades in the final exam and then making everybody
hang around for an extra week before turning us loose for summer
vacation. Presumably they did this to reinforce or belief in
Purgatory.” How can anyone resist a book that opens with this
paragraph as Dave Van Ronk’s autobiography, The
Mayor of McDougal Street (Hachette
Book Group/Da Capo Press,2013, $15.99/9.99 or used from $3.06)
written with Elijah Wald,
does? A creature of New York,
Van Ronk, of Swedish and Italian descent was born in Brooklyn, but
migrated to Queens as a child, where he grew up following his own
muse, early becoming entranced with music on
his way to becoming perhaps the finest white blues guitarist and
singer in America
during the late fifties and sixties, the time of the folk music craze
in America, and beyond.
Throughout
this memoir, Van Ronk emerges as a smart, articulate, thoughtful
observer of the music scene generally and the emergence of
Greenwhich Village at the center of the New York folk music world
during the fifites and sixties. Dropping out of school when he was
thirteen or so, he gradually migrated to the Village, where he spent
years perfecting his craft on the guitar, learning blues from a
variety of mentors, becoming an active participant and then central
feature in the weekly Sunday hootenannies in Washington Square Park.
A voracious reader and listener, he also
became involved in the left
wing politics pervasive at that time, and
remained a dedicated lefty until his death from cancer in 2002.
Van
Ronk, looked at from fifty years after his greatest popularity was
achieved, probably is most important as a chronicler of his times and
a commentator on music and musicians of rare insight combined with
clever articulation. Here I’ve culled a few of his many gems:
“...to be a musician requires a
qualitatively different kind of listening”...Van
Ronk studied jazz with old
jazz man Jack Norton on Saturday’s with a group of other teens
besotted with jazz and developing skill along the way. Learned to
listen, that less is more, “never use two notes when one will do.
Never use one note when silence will do. The essence of music is
punctuated silence.” He
later learned from guitar great Mississippi John Hurt, and many of
the other long hidden black blues guitarists of the early twentieth
century. He devotes an entire
chapter to the influence of the Rev. Gary Davis on American blues and
his own music.
Rev. Gary Davis – Hesitation Blues
Dave Van Ronk – Hesitation Blues –
1950 – 1961
“Theft is the first law of art.”
“I think it was a good thing that, back in
the Renaissance, people like Michelangelo were treated like interior
decorators. A well-written song is a craft item. Take care of the
craft, and the art will take care of itself.”
His thoughts on Dylan’s going electric:
“Working musicians are very rarely purists. The purists are out in
the audience kibitzing, not onstage trying to make a living.”
The distinction between folk, rock & roll,
and country: “...if the accompaniment to this music is acoustic,
then it’s folk. With amplified backup, then it’s rock & roll,
except in those cases where a pedal steel is added, then it’s
country.”
Van Ronk is a great story-teller! His account
of the so-called “feud” between him and Bob Dylan is filled with
both humor and nuance, with a retelling of how Dylan recorded The
House of the Rising Sun, each of their refusals to continue
singing it, and his final discovery of the real House of the Rising
Sun in New Orleans while with Odetta. Familiar names from a
well-remembered musical period keep dropping, each one evoking
memories, a sense of deja vu. Throughout the book, the stories
abound, yet this book presents a cohesive picture of an important
period in American music with one of the seminal figures who both
created and inhabited it.
Van Ronk’s social activism and increasingly
frequent writing in small magazines and slingers sometimes emphasized
the need for folk singers and other musicians to refuse to work for
free in situations where the person they were working for was
exploiting their labor while hiring dishwashers, cooks, and other
necessary employees. His writing in this area, as a developing
professional musician still resonates into the musical world, where
too many musicians are giving it away in settings other than benefit
concerts. He maintains his sense of political radicalism, it seems,
throughout his career, although his comments suggest he looks back at
his adolescence and early adulthood with wry irony.
Dave Van Ronk
Elijah Wald
Dave
Van Ronk, while not having a formal education, was a voracious reader
and student of what he saw. Elijah Wald, whose writings include a
noted biography of bluesman Robert Johnson and a recent account of
Bob Dylan’s famous and controversial move to electric guitar, as
well as lots of other writing, is listed as co-writer. When I asked
him how much was Van Ronk and how much his, he wrote me, “The
language is entirely Dave's -- as, I must say, is much of mine, since
he was a huge influence on the way I think, talk, and write. He
dropped out of school long before college, around age 12 or 13, but
was phenomenally well read and also had spent years arguing politics
and poetry with the best minds of Greenwich Village….” He
went on to say, “I did write some connecting material, but it was
minor and I swear he couldn't have picked out what wasn't his, if
he'd had a chance to read it-nor can I, except a couple of lines I
was particularly pleased with, and I'm not telling which those were.”
For
those interested in the emerging music scene of the fifties and
sixties, the moves from jazz, to folk to rock and roll,
Van Ronk’s book is must reading. He’s intelligent, funny, a
cogent and unbalanced observer of the scene he was such a crucial
part of. His life
was always chaotic, existing on the edge of poverty as well as the
front edge of musical change. The
South and Appalachia become source material which comes to New York
and Newport rather than a world he, himself, explores. He knows
people like blueser Gary Davis or bluegrass great Earl Scruggs
through their appearances in Washington Square and Carnegie Hall
rather than on their home territory. Written
with Elijah Wald, I recommend The
Mayor of MacDougal Street
most highly. I bought the book.
Dave
Van Ronk – St. James Infirmary Blues
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