In praise of Dave Van Ronk

 

I’ve been reading Dave Van Ronk’s memoir, The Mayor of McDougal Street (Da Capo Press), on account of it being the loose inspiration for the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, one of the best films about music and thwarted ambition that I’ve ever seen. Some incidents reappear in the film although Van Ronk was never quite as unlucky as Llewyn. It left me wishing that I’d read it before I wrote the folk chapters in 33 Revolutions Per Minute, and that I’d had the chance to interview him before his death in 2002. Frankly, the book is so funny, candid, insightful and unpretentious that it’s impossible to read it without wishing you could meet the guy. Here are my nine favourite passages, some of which are still relevant in different contexts in 2013, in order to encourage you to read it. (That said, dear publishers, if I quote too much here let me know and I’ll take it down asap.) Oh, and see the movie too.

On the 1950s jazz wars

The modernists were aesthetic Darwinists, arguing that jazz has to progress and that later forms must necessarily be superior to earlier ones. The traditionalists were Platonists, insisting that early jazz was “pure” and that all subsequent developments and dilutions and degenerations. This comic donnybrook dominated jazz criticism for ten or fifteen years, with neither side capable of seeing the strengths of the other, until it finally subsided and died, probably from sheer boredom. Before that point, though, a lot of otherwise sensible people had made asses of themselves.

 

On playing the banjo

 

So I switched over and quickly became one of the worst tenor banjo players on the trad scene. And to be the worst at tenor banjo, you’re really competing, because that’s a fast track.

 

On protest songs

For myself, I was always ready to go to a rally or a demonstration or a benefit for this, that, or the other cause, and to sing my songs, but I did very little political material. It did not suit my style, and I never did it that convincingly. I just did not have that kind of voice or that kind of presence. Also, although I am a singer and have always had strong political views, I felt that my politics were no more relevant to my music than they would have been to the work of any other craftsman. Just because you are a cabinet maker and a leftist, are you supposed to make left-wing cabinets?

 

On Pete Seeger (late 50s article)

 

I doubt if Seeger considers himself a ‘folklorist’ per se; but rather he looks at folk music as a human being, subject to love, hate, enthusiasm, sorrow—in short, all of the emotions with which folkmusic deals. He is not ‘preserving’ folklore but living it, and so are we, and he knows it. He neither sings up nor down to his material but with it. And there is no dichotomy between the performer and the content of his songs.

 

On working for free (later 50s article)

 

I know several folksingers who have taken jobs without pay, not quite understanding that aside from its artistic nature, singing in front of an audience is work like any other job and that even if they do not need or want pay a great many of their colleagues do and that in any other line of endeavor their practices are referred to as scabbing and its practitioners are known as scabs.

 

On the coffeehouse scene

 

Coffeehouse folksingers were squeaky-clean optimists who brushed their teeth twenty-seven times a day, wore drip-dry seersucker suits, and sang “La Bamba”.

 

On the young Bob Dylan

 

He had a lot of stories about who he was and where he came from, and he never seemed to be able to keep them straight. I think that’s one reason Bobby never gave good interviews: his thinking is so convoluted that he simply does not know how to level, because he’s always thinking of the effect that he’s having on whoever he’s talking to.

 

On covering the Reverend Gary Davis’s Cocaine Blues

Frankly, that song had some other disappointing aspects as well. When I first learned it from Gary, one of my jazz musician buddies said, “Yeah, that’s a good one for you to do, because, you know, when you get finished with your show, there’ll be people lined up back in your dressing room to give you toot.” That sounded kind of interesting, but as it turned out, he was entirely mistaken. Instead, for a while there I would finish up and go back to my dressing room, and there would be people lined up asking me to give them some. It was very disillusioning.

 

On the issue of whether white singers should cover material by black artists

 

The whole debate was a tempest in a teapot, generated by critics who needed something to write about… Forty years later, on somber reflection, having fully studied the arguments on both sides, I have reached what I believe to be a measured and definitive judgment on the matter: Who cares?