Dave Van Ronk

The 1965 Album Dave Von Ronk Sings the Blues

Dave Van Ronk (June 30 1936 – February 10 2002) was a folk singer born in Brooklyn and nicknamed the "Mayor of Greenwich Village." He is perhaps best known for his Anti-war folk songwriting, like the sardonic Luang Prabang.[1]

Career

Van Ronk moved from Brooklyn to Queens and began attending Richmond Hill High School at the age of 15. By 1949, he was performing in a barbershop quartert group, but dropped out in the early 1950s to do a stint in the Merchant Marines.

In 1956 he began his professional music career, touring colleges and small venues in the beat scene. He performed blues, jazz and folk music, writing his own songs and doing new arrangements of classics. Initially he strived to revived traditional jazz, observing "We wanted to play traditional jazz in the worst way...and we did!" The jazz revival didn't take off though, and Van Ronk turned to performing blues music he'd stumbled across and enjoyed years early, by artists like Furry Lewis and Mississippi John Hurt. Van Ronk was no the first white musician to perform African-American blues, but became noted for interpreting such in it's original context.

Van Ronk became noted for both his large physical stature and his expansive charisma, which belied an intellectual, cultured gentleman of many talents. Among his many interests: cooking, science-fiction, world history, and politics. During the 1960s he supported radical political causes and was a member of the Libertarian League, taking part in the infamous Stonewall Riots. In 1974 he staged a concert with Bob Dylan, an old friend, in aid of refugees from the military coup by Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

In 2000 he performed at Blink Willie's in Atlanta, clothed in garish Hawaiian garb, speaking fondly of his impending return to Greenwich Village. He reminsced fondly about tunes like Good Ol Wagon, a song he says was humorous back in 1962. He was married to the singer Andrea Vuocolo. A street in Greenwich Village was named after him in 2004. He continued to perform for four decades and gave his last concert just a few months before his death. Van Ronk was very influential on the music scene in New York City in the 1960s. He found it amusing to be called "a legend in his own time."

Cultural impact

Dave Van Ronk is perhaps underestimated as a musician and blues guitarist. His guitar work is noteworthy for both syncopation and precision, compared with fellow musicians like Mississippi John Hurt. Van Ronk ranks high in bringing blues style to Greenwich Village in during the 1960s. During this crucial period, he performed with the likes of Bob Dylan and spend many years teaching guitar in Greenwich Village.

He is often described as an irreverent and incomparable guitar artist and intrepreter of black blues and folk, with an uncannily precise ability at improvisation. Fellow musician Neil Diamond said Van Ronk's rendition of Clouds (sometimes known as Both Sides Now) was the finest of it's kind. His Prestige album Inside Dave Van Ronk is available (albeit limited) in remastered form from Fantasy Records.

Eccentricities

Van Ronk was among the first to perceive traditional jazz and ragtime as something performable on the acoustic guitar. His guitar arrangements of such ragtime hits as St. Louis Tickle, The Entertainer, and Maple Leaf Rag continue to frustrate and challenge aspiring guitar players.

Van Ronk was eccentric in refusing to fly or drive, and declined to ever move from Greenwich Village. He typically traveled (and advocated such travel) throughout North America by train. Van Ronk's trademark stoneware jug of Tullamore Dew was often seen on stage next to him in his early days.

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 Bob (Dylan's) first NY 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. Van Ronk retold the blues intimately....for a time, his most dedicated follower was Dylan."