The Mayor of MacDougal Street (37 page)

The stumbling block was that Dave was acutely conscious of how much time and energy would be required to do the project right, and we never found a publisher who would pay the kind of advance that would have allowed him to take a year off from performing and devote himself to writing. Then, in 2002, he discovered that he had cancer. He canceled all future gigs and went into the hospital for an operation, and we agreed that as soon as he got out, we would devote the next months to finishing the book. The best-laid plans, as oft-times, ganged aglee . . . He taped a few reminiscences in the hospital, and I made one unsuccessful trip to tape some more after he came home, but then he snuck out on me.

So I had to finish the book myself, combining the few sections he had already written with what I could glean from years of interviews, stage patter, and random jottings. I am happy with the result, but it is a quite different book than what Dave and I envisioned. His model was H. L. Mencken, specifically the “Days” books, and he wanted to capture the full flavor of the Village in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He planned to focus on the folk scene, but also to give a sense of everything else that was going on around it: the writers, comedians, painters, crooks, and all the uncategorizable denizens of the streets, bars, and cafés. Brendan Behan should be here, for example. Dave enjoyed remembering the big dinners Behan would host when he had a play opening on Broadway, at which he would treat the guests to food, booze, and self-penned ditties like “Don’t Muck About with the Moon.” But few interviewers bothered to ask Dave about anything but the folk and blues scenes, so few of those memories were preserved. There are tantalizing hints of what is missing, like a mention of teenage visits to the Cedar Bar, where painters like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning were regulars; but they are only brief mentions, rarely pursued.

Even on the subject of music, Dave would have wanted to range farther afield. He always thought of himself as a jazz musician manqué, and while he was proud to have been part of an exciting, productive movement, he kept his sense of perspective. At the peak of the folk boom, a single evening’s entertainment in the Village could also include Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Lennie Tristano. Bob Dylan opening for the Greenbriar Boys at Folk City was historic in cultural terms, but musically Dave would not have considered it in the same league with the week at the Village Gate when Aretha Franklin opened for the John Coltrane Quintet, and he would have wanted more of that in here.
³⁵

Still, this is a fair representation of Dave’s memories of and opinions about the “Great Folk Scare”—a favorite phrase, coined by his old friend Utah Phillips—and that was always our primary intention. Some readers may find it odd that a man who continued to be very productive for another thirty-plus years should end his story in the late 1960s, but Dave never considered this an autobiography. He wanted to write a personal history of an exciting scene that changed the course of American music, with plenty of first-person anecdotes and opinions, and he had no interest in detailing his own comings and goings beyond that period.

I think that was a smart choice, but not because he ceased to be a vital and interesting artist and thinker. As a musician, Dave kept growing until the end of his life, and much of his greatest work was done long after the peak of his sixties-era fame (including an album of Bertolt Brecht, two of swing jazz, and a jug band version of Prokofiev’s
Peter and the Wolf
). As a raconteur, philosopher, and all-around Johnsonian presence, he came into his own only in the 1980s, and it is a pity that there was not a Boswell handy to jot down his conversation—for anyone who spent an evening sitting across from him as he reclined on his immense couch, sipping wine and smoking innumerable cigarettes, those performances were as great as anything he ever put onstage.

Dave and I became friends in the mid-1970s, after I showed up at his door to take guitar lessons. By the second or third week, he had moved my lesson to the end of the day, and when my hour was up, he would cook dinner, then regale me with stories, opinions, and recordings he thought I should hear, until I staggered home sometime after daylight. Though I was not aware of it at the time, this was probably the low point of Dave’s life, both professionally and personally. The folk scene had all but disappeared, and he had attempted to beat a tactical retreat by setting up once again as a guitar teacher, but bills were piling up, and as he turned forty, he balefully pictured a dull future of schlepping his guitar from club to club, shouting over noisy drunks, or providing a moment of recaptured youth for graying fans in Unitarian church basements. He was drinking heavily, and often by the second fifth of Jameson he would be grumbling, “If I had just stayed in the goddamn merchant marine, I could be a first mate by now.”

To me, he was a genius, and despite the grumbling, I learned more from him in those evenings than I have from anyone else, before or since. Dave
was the most voracious reader I have known, and he would send me home with thick volumes of history or slim paperbacks of his favorite science fiction—“It’s mind rot, but good mind rot,” he would say. (He loved those intermediate categories: “That’s first-rate second-rate jazz,” he would say of something like the Joe Venuti-Eddie Lang duets, and he took it as the ultimate compliment when I said the same of his final jazz album,
Sweet and Lowdown
. It was a way of maintaining perspective, being able to love and acclaim something while remembering that there are people like Shakespeare and Louis Armstrong.) When I became a writer, he loaded me up with Mencken, Calvin Trillin, and A. J. Liebling, hoping they would teach me the craft. And his musical tastes were equally broad. He rarely played me any folk or blues records, but I heard Bing Crosby, Jo Stafford, Groucho Marx, the Bulgarian Folk Ensemble of Phillipe Koutev (Dave would sing bass along with the women’s choir), and endless Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton.

He was himself making astonishing music at that time. I was with him when
Sunday Street
came out, the first solo album he had done in years. It was on a small New England label, Philo Records, and in purely economic terms it represented a drastic step down from his previous few releases, which had been richly produced sets on major labels. Musically, though, it was at least as good as anything he had done in the 1960s—a lot of people still consider it his finest album. The return to teaching had led him to a new fascination with the guitar, and his arrangements were understated marvels that ranged from Morton and Scott Joplin to Joni Mitchell and old acoustic blues pieces. It was his singing, though, that was the revelation. He was phrasing with a taste and intricacy that was beyond anything on his previous records. He knew it, too, and on bad nights that would help to fuel his frustration: the audiences were caught up in their memories of a phase he had outgrown, still yelling for “Cocaine Blues” and failing to note the improvements. He tried to be philosophical about it: “The poor we have always with us,” he’d growl. “So, the folk fans don’t really listen—that just means they’re like everybody else.” But it annoyed him. He had no particular affection for his past work and was proud to still be refining his craftsmanship.

Luckily, Dave was not a man to dwell on the frustrations. By the 1980s he was creating a new life for himself. In part, this was sparked by an odd
stroke of luck: After a lifetime of refusing to fly, in 1981 he received the irresistable offer to come over to England and appear on the BBC’s
This Is Your Life
TV show as a surprise for Jim Watt, the world lightweight boxing champion, who happened to be a devoted fan. That led to a series of European tours, as well as trips to Australia and Japan, which substantially altered his financial situation as well as finally providing him with an opportunity to see all sorts of places he knew only from books. He also hooked up with Andrea Vuocolo, who eventually became his second wife, and with her support adopted a new lifestyle. He lost over a hundred pounds, wine replaced whiskey, and the nights became somewhat shorter. He still entertained visitors into the wee hours, and few of us left sober, but there was none of the bitterness of those middle years.

The visitors also got younger and more varied. The eighties brought a new wave of singer-songwriters to MacDougal Street, based in a club called the Speakeasy, and many of them took Dave as their adviser, inspiration, and éminence grise. Christine Lavin, Tom Intondi, David Massengill, Frank Christian, Bill Morrissey, Rod MacDonald, Jack Hardy—there are literally dozens of names that could be added to that list. Some came for guitar lessons, but most just met Dave at the club or were brought over to his place by friends and quickly learned that he was a man worth listening to, as well as the main link to the glory days whose legend had lured them to New York.

Dave occasionally talked about those days, but his real interest was what was happening around him. He constantly reminded his young friends that the singers of the past had been no more naturally talented than any other crop; they had just been lucky enough to arrive at the right moment. He enjoyed recounting anecdotes of the fifties and sixties, but refused to get caught up in the romance: “There was a lot that was great about that period,” he would say, “but if I start bloviating about how wonderful it was, what I say and what you hear will not be the same thing. It has been my observation that when you ask some
alter kocker
about the old days, his answer—however he may phrase it—will always be, ‘Of course, everything was much better then, because I could take a flight of stairs three at a time.’ The truth of the matter is that some things have gotten worse and some things have improved. For example, the quality of Chinese food in New York is a hell of a lot better than it was in the 1950s . . . ”

That attitude was what made me so eager to have him put his thoughts down on paper. Because Dave was not only a supremely engaging storyteller but a wise and insightful one. I wish he had written about the dozens of other subjects he knew so well, but I am happy and proud that at least we have this book. His story of the Great Folk Scare was an obvious place to start, and I doubt anyone will give us a more measured, fair, and entertaining picture of that time.

ABC of Reading, The
(Pound)

Abortion

Abrahams, Roger

Absinthe

“Ace in the Hole,”

ACTU.
See
Association of Catholic Trade Unions

Adams, Derroll

Adelphi Hall

Adler, Ellen

Adnopoz, Elliott.
See also
Elliott, Jack

AF of M (musicians’ union)

Airs for Four Voices
(Dowland)

“All Along the Watchtower,”

Allen, Woody

Allison, Mose

Allmen, Rick

Almanac House commune

Alpert, Richard

Amateurs

American Legion

American Youth Hostels

Anarchists

Anderson, Casey

Anderson, Eric

Anderson, Pink

Andrew (cowboy hitchhiker)

Anti-lynching campaign

Antiwar movement.
See also
Vietnam War

Appalachians

Aqua-rama
(TV show)

Armstrong, Louis

Arm-wrestling

Army hustlers

Arrangers/arrangements

Art

and craft

Artists Against the Blacklist

Art songs

Asch, Moe

Asheville Folk Festival

Assimilation

Association of Catholic Trade Unions (ACTU)

Atlas, Stan

“At the Jazz Band Ball,”

Authenticity

Autrey, Herman

“Avalon Blues,”

“Backwater Blues,”

Baez, Joan

Baez, Mimi

Baird, Curly

Baker, Etta

“Ballad of Pete Seeger, The,”

Ballads for Sectarians
(recording)

Ballad singers

“Baltimore Rag,”

“Bamboo,”

Banjo playing

Banninger, John

Barbershop quartets

Basie, Count

Baudelaire, Charles Pierre

Beards

Beat Generation, The
(recording)

Beatles

Beatniks

Bebop

Bechet, Sidney

Beiderbeck, Bix

Belafonte, Harry

Berkeley, Roy

Berlin, Irving

Berlin uprising

Berry, Chuck

Bibb, Leon

Big Judy.
See
Isquith, Judy

Bikel, Theo

Bitter End

Blacklists

Blacks

“Black Snake Moan,”

Blackwell, Russ

Blackwell, Scrapper

Blake, Eubie

Blind Blake

“Blind Rafferty.”
See
Van Ronk, Dave, writing as “Blind Rafferty”

Blossom Dearie

“Blow Gabriel,”

Blue, Dave.
See also
Cohen, Dave

Bluegrass

Blues

historical research on

white blues singers

Bodenheim, Max

Boggs, Dock

Boguslav, Ray

Bohemians

Bolden, Buddy

Bongo players

Bookbinder, Roy

Boone, Pat

Boston

“Both Sides Now,”

Brand, Oscar

Brecht, Bertolt

Brel, Jacques

Brent, John

Brill, Bob

Brill, Sylvia

Broadside of Boston, The
(magazine)

Brooklyn