| Dave Van Ronk | |
| Birth Name: | David Kenneth Ritz Van Ronk |
| Birth Date: | June 30, 1936 |
| Birth Place: | New York City, U.S. |
| Death Place: | New York City, U.S. |
| Years Active: | 1959–2002 |
| Label: | Folkways |
David Kenneth Ritz Van Ronk (June 30, 1936 – February 10, 2002) was an American folk singer. An important figure in the American folk music revival and New York City's Greenwich Village scene in the 1960s, he was nicknamed the "Mayor of MacDougal Street".[1]
Van Ronk's work ranged from old English ballads to blues, gospel, rock, New Orleans jazz, and swing. He was also known for performing instrumental ragtime guitar music, especially his transcription of "St. Louis Tickle" and Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag". Van Ronk was a widely admired avuncular figure in "the Village", presiding over the coffeehouse folk culture and acting as a friend to many up-and-coming artists by inspiring, assisting, and promoting them. Folk performers he befriended include Jim and Jean, Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Patrick Sky, Phil Ochs, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Joni Mitchell. Dylan recorded Van Ronk's arrangement of the traditional song "House of the Rising Sun" on his first album, which the Animals would later cover and would become a chart-topping rock single in 1964,[2] helping inaugurate the folk rock movement.[3]
Van Ronk received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in December 1997.
Van Ronk was born in Brooklyn, New York City, to a family that was "mostly Irish, despite the Dutch 'Van' name".[4] He moved from Brooklyn to Queens around 1945 and began attending Holy Child Jesus Catholic School, whose students were mainly of Irish descent. He had been performing in a barbershop quartet since 1949, but left before finishing high school, and spent time in the Merchant Marine.[5]
His first professional gigs playing tenor banjola were with various traditional jazz bands around New York, of which he later observed: "We wanted to play traditional jazz in the worst way ... and we did!" But the trad jazz revival had already passed its prime, and Van Ronk turned to performing blues he had stumbled across while shopping for jazz 78s, by artists like the Reverend Gary Davis, Furry Lewis and Mississippi John Hurt.
By about 1958, he was firmly committed to the folk-blues style, accompanying himself with his own acoustic guitar. He performed blues, jazz and folk music, occasionally writing his own songs but generally arranging the work of earlier artists and his folk revival peers.
He became noted both for his large physical stature and his expansive charisma, which bespoke an intellectual, cultured gentleman of many talents. Among his many interests were cooking, science fiction (he was active for some time in science fiction fandom, referring to it as "mind rot",[6] and contributed to fanzines), world history, and politics. During the 1960s he supported radical left-wing political causes and was a member of the Libertarian League and the Trotskyist American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI, later renamed the Workers League[7]). In 1974, he appeared at "An Evening For Salvador Allende", a concert organized by Phil Ochs, alongside such other performers as his old friend Bob Dylan, to protest the overthrow of the democratic socialist government of Chile and to aid refugees from the U.S.-backed military junta led by Augusto Pinochet. After Ochs's suicide in 1976, Van Ronk joined the many performers who played at his memorial concert in the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden, playing his bluesy version of the traditional folk ballad "He Was A Friend Of Mine".[8] Although Van Ronk was less politically active in later years, he remained committed to anarchist and socialist ideals and was a dues-paying member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) almost until his death.
Van Ronk was among 13 people arrested at the Stonewall Inn June 28, 1969—the night of the Stonewall Riots, which is widely credited as the spark of the contemporary gay rights movement. Van Ronk had been dining at a neighboring restaurant, joined the riot against the Stonewall's police occupation, and was dragged from the crowd into the building by police deputy inspector Seymour Pine.[9] [10] [11] The police slapped and punched Van Ronk to the point of near unconsciousness, handcuffed him to a radiator near the doorway, and decided to charge him for assault.[12] Recalling the expanding riot, Van Ronk said, "There were more people out there [outside the building] when I came out than when I went in. Things were still flying through the air, cacophony—I mean, just screaming and yelling, sirens, strobe lights, the whole spaghetti."[13] The next day, he was arrested and later released on his own recognizance for having thrown a heavy object at a police officer.[14] City records show he was charged with felony assault in the second degree[15] and pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of harassment, classified in 1969 as a violation under PL 240.25.
In 2000, he performed at Blind Willie's in Atlanta, speaking fondly of his impending return to Greenwich Village. He reminisced over tunes like "You've Been a Good Old Wagon", a song teasing a worn-out lover, which he ruefully remarked had seemed humorous to him back in 1962.
He continued to perform for four decades and gave his last concert just a few months before his death.
Van Ronk was married to Terri Thal in the 1960s,[16] lived for many years with Joanne Grace, then married Andrea Vuocolo, with whom he spent the rest of his life.
On February 10, 2002, Van Ronk died in a New York hospital of cardiopulmonary failure while undergoing postoperative treatment for colon cancer.[17] He died before completing work on his memoirs, which were finished by his collaborator, Elijah Wald, and published in 2005 as The Mayor Of MacDougal Street.[18]
Van Ronk's guitar work, for which he credits Tom Paley as fingerpicking teacher, is noteworthy for both syncopation and precision.[19] Revealing similarities to Mississippi John Hurt's, Van Ronk's main influence was the Reverend Gary Davis, who conceived the guitar as "a piano around his neck." Van Ronk took this pianistic approach and added a harmonic sophistication adapted from the band voicings of Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington.
Van Ronk was among the first to adapt traditional jazz and ragtime to the solo acoustic guitar with arrangements of such ragtime hits as "St. Louis Tickle", "The Entertainer", "The Pearls" and "Maple Leaf Rag". Van Ronk brought blues style to Greenwich Village during the 1960s, while introducing the folk world to the complex harmonies of Kurt Weill with his many Brecht-Weill interpretations. A traditional revivalists who moved with the times, Van Ronk brought old blues and ballads together with the new sounds of Dylan, Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Dylan says of his impact:[20]
Van Ronk gave guitar lessons in Greenwich Village, including to Christine Lavin, David Massengill, Terre Roche and Suzzy Roche. He influenced his protégé Danny Kalb and the Blues Project.
Van Ronk once said, "Painting is all about space, and music is all about time."[21]
The Coen brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis follows a folk singer similar to Van Ronk, and incorporates anecdotes based on Van Ronk's life.[22] He is mentioned in David Bowie's 2013 song ‘(You Will) Set the World on Fire' on The Next Day album[23] and was mentioned among the dead musicians and recording artists in the song "Mirror Door" by the Who in 2006 on the album Endless Wire.
In 2004, a section of Sheridan Square, where Barrow Street meets Washington Place, was renamed Dave Van Ronk Street in his memory.[24] Van Ronk was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously by the World Folk Music Association in 2004.[25]
Joni Mitchell said that Van Ronk's rendition of her song "Both Sides Now" (which he called "Clouds") was her favorite version of the song.[26]
Van Ronk refused for many years to fly and never learned to drive (he took trains or buses or, when possible, recruited a girlfriend or young musician as his driver), and he declined to ever move from Greenwich Village for any extended period of time (having stayed in California for a short time in the 1960s).[27] Van Ronk's trademark stoneware jug of Tullamore Dew was frequently seen on stage next to him in his early days.
Critic Robert Shelton described Van Ronk as "the musical mayor of MacDougal Street":
...a tall, garrulous hairy man of three quarters, or, more accurately, three fifths Irish descent. Topped by light brownish hair and a leonine beard, which he smoothed down several times a minute, he resembled an unmade bed strewn with books, record jackets, pipes, empty whiskey bottles, lines from obscure poets, finger picks, and broken guitar strings. He was [Dylan]'s first New York guru. Van Ronk was a walking museum of the blues. Through an early interest in jazz, he had gravitated toward black music—its jazz pole, its jug-band and ragtime center, its blues bedrock.... His manner was rough and testy, disguising a warm, sensitive core.[28]
Van Ronk was author of a posthumous memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2005) written with Elijah Wald. Anecdotes from the book were used as a source for the film Inside Llewyn Davis.[31]
Van Ronk and Richard Ellington collected and edited The Bosses' Songbook: [32] Songs to Stifle the Flames of Discontent, Second Edition – A Collection of Modern Political Songs and Satire (Richard Ellington, publisher: New York, 1959).[32] [33]