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Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 22:24:51 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Dave Van Ronk: Musician and mentor to the young Bob Dylan
Dave Van Ronk: Musician and mentor to the young Bob Dylan
Tony Russell
Guardian
Wednesday February 13, 2002
The singer and guitarist Dave Van Ronk, who has died
aged 65, had since the 1960s been one of the most
distinctive voices in the musical community of New
York's Greenwich Village, and long associated with the
early career of Bob Dylan. A bearded bear of a man, he
was equally at home in blues, jazz, Anglo-American
folksong and ragtime. A Van Ronk performance was a
switchback ride through American vernacular music, from
Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies to Cocaine Blues and
beyond, taking in Brecht and Weill's Mack The Knife and
a setting of WB Yeats's poem, Song Of The Wandering
Angus. His heroes, he liked to say, were Donald Duck,
Lenin and WC Fields - "because they all did what they
wanted".
Van Ronk grew up in Brooklyn, learned guitar at high
school and began playing with traditional jazz bands.
His interest in other African-American folk musics was
not stirred until he encountered the singers Odetta and
Josh White in the late 1950s, when he began performing
on New York's club and coffeehouse circuit. For a time
he roomed with the writer and music historian Sam
Charters, who was shortly to publish his pioneering
book The Country Blues, and the two played in bands
called the Orange Blossom Jug Five and the Ragtime Jug
Stompers.
Van Ronk was one of the first villagers to draw
attention to the compositions of a younger musician
lately arrived in New York, when he began to sing Bob
Dylan's He Was A Friend Of Mine. He later recorded it
on his 1963 album Folksinger. When Dylan first came to
New York, he often stayed with Van Ronk and his wife,
Terri Thal, at their apartment on West 15th Street. For
a few months Thal was his business manager, before
Dylan put his affairs in the hands of the wily Albert
Grossman, of whom Van Ronk said: "Albert was easy to
deal with. It wasn't till maybe two days after you
would see Albert that you'd realise your underwear had
been stolen."
Dylan listened attentively to Van Ronk's huge
repertoire, regarding him, in his biographer Robert
Shelton's phrase, as "his first New York guru . . . a
walking museum of the blues". Van Ronk was the source
of several songs Dylan later recorded, among them
Dink's Blues and House Of The Rising Sun, Dylan's
recording of which was in turn absorbed by the Animals
and became a pop hit.
By the mid-1960s, Van Ronk was a major figure on the
East Coast folk scene, appearing at folk festivals and
Carnegie Hall, teaching guitar and recording steadily.
People had begun to call him "the mayor of Greenwich
Village", a phrase that may have originated with
Shelton, who described him as "a tall, garrulous, hairy
man of three-fifths Irish descent . . . he resembled an
unmade bed strewn with books, record jackets, pipes,
empty whiskey bottles, lines from obscure poets, finger
picks and broken guitar strings."
As with many of his contemporaries, his music was
fuelled by political conviction: in the 1960s he was
dedicated to the civil rights movement, and he was a
lifelong Trotskyist, with a relish for involvement and
confrontation. A friend asked him how he came to be
arrested in the 1969 riot when New York police busted a
gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. "I was passing by and I saw
what was going down," he said, "and I figured, they
can't have a riot without me!" In 1974 he appeared with
Dylan and others at a benefit concert for Chilean
political refugees.
He continued to perform and to record. On the
collection Let No One Deceive You (1990), he and the
English folksinger Frankie Armstrong sang the lyrics of
Bertolt Brecht, while the double albums A Chrestomathy
(1992) and To All My Friends In Far-Flung Places (1994)
were bulging folios of musical Americana from Scott
Joplin's The Entertainer to Dylan's Subterranean
Homesick Blues.
He played his last concert in October, and, while
recovering from an operation for colon cancer, was
sorting through tapes to put together for his next
album. He is survived by his second wife, Andrea
Vuocolo.
David "Dave" Van Ronk, folk musician, born June 30
1936; died February 10 2002
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