Salon
25 February 2002
4/5) Dave Van Ronk: The Folkways Years, 1959-1961 (Smithsonian Folkways) and No Dirty Names (Verve Folkways, 1966). When he died February 10th at sixty-five, Van Ronk left behind a well of generosity and affection. Many of those who passed through the Greenwich Village folk milieu in the 1960s, perhaps most, learned the classics from him—“In the Pines,” “Careless Love,” “Spike Driver’s Moan,” “Betty and Dupree”—but as The Folkways Years makes plain, what set Van Ronk apart from those with whom he shared his place and time was not his ability to bring the old music to life. Only rarely, as on the shattering “Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again” from No Dirty Names, one of his few original compositions—the sardonic title instantly dissolving into a chant of self-loathing as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street” looks down from his railroad flat at the junkies hustling their women in the doorways—did he sing anything you couldn’t have heard someone else sing better. Van Ronk was different because he was what so many people think they want to be, if only they could find the time: a man whose life was a gesture of welcoming, a storyteller whose stories allowed those who were listening to imagine that they themselves were in the story, at the same time sitting back in the warmth of Van Ronk’s presence, listening to their own adventures.