RE: [Marxism] A second look at Dave Van Ronk

["John Obrien" <causecollector@xxxxxxx>]

In addition to the enormous musical legacy of Dave Van Ronk, I just want to
express my admiration for another contribution of Dave Van Ronk.  He was to
my knowledge the only non-Gay person to be arrested at the historic
Stonewall Rebellion, protesting police brutality and repression against Gays
and Lesbians in June 1969.

Dave Van Ronk will always be remembered by millions of Gays, as much for his
participation in that rebellion, as his many other cultural and political
contributions to our world.

Dave Van Ronk presente!




> From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> Reply-To: Activists and scholars in Marxist
> tradition<marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> CC: jjmarlin@xxxxxxxx
> Subject: [Marxism] A second look at the folk music revival
> Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 09:46:53 -0400
>
> A Second Look At The Folk Music Revival
> by Louis Proyect
> Book Review
>
>     Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald: The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Da Capo
> Press, Cambridge, MA., 2005, ISBN 0-306-81407-2, 246 pages, $26.00
> (hardcover)
>
>     David Hajdu: Positively 4th Street, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New
> York, 2001, ISBN 0-374-28199-8, 328 pages, $26.00 (hardcover)
>
> (Swans - June 19, 2006)   The publication of Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume
> One invites further explorations into the folk revival. In preparing a
> review of Dylan's luminous memoir for Swans
> (http://www.swans.com/library/art11/lproy29.html), I read two other books
> to understand the backdrop. They will now be reviewed here as a follow-up.
>
> One is Elijah Wald's The Mayor of MacDougal Street, an 'as told to' memoir
> by Dave Van Ronk, a pioneer of the folk music revival who was dying of
> cancer while the memoir was being written. Despite approaching mortality,
> Van Ronk's good humor and vitality suffuses the entire book. A life-long
> socialist, Van Ronk nearly never wrote or sang topical songs. But his
> memoir reveals him to be an astute surveyor both of American society and of
> his own modest but important role in catalyzing social change through folk
> music.
>
> The other is David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street, a study of the
> relationships between Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, and between Richard Fariña
> and Mimi Baez Fariña, Joan's younger sister. Fariña died in a motorcycle
> accident in 1966 and his wife died of cancer in 2001. Hajdu's first book, a
> biography of Billy Strayhorn, demonstrated an uncommon ability to place a
> musician into his or her cultural and social context. While all the
> portraits drawn by Hajdu are compelling, I will focus on that of Richard
> Fariña, who is an interesting contrast to Dave Van Ronk.
>
> Although Hajdu's Dylan is the sneering, hostile figure made familiar in the
> Pennebaker Cinéma vérité "Don't Look Back," the Chronicles reflects a
> mellower and wiser figure generous to a fault to everybody who he
> encountered on the way up, most especially Van Ronk:
>
>     Dave Van Ronk, he was the one performer I burned to learn particulars
> from. He was great on records, but in person he was greater. Van Ronk was
> from Brooklyn, had seaman's papers, a wide walrus mustache, long brown
> straight hair which flew down covering half his face. He turned every folk
> song into a surreal melodrama, a theatrical piece -- suspenseful, down to
> the last minute. Dave got to the bottom of things. It was like he had an
> endless supply of poison and I wanted some . . . couldn't do without it.
> Van Ronk seemed ancient, battle tested. Every night I felt like I was
> sitting at the feet of a timeworn monument. Dave sang folk songs, jazz
> standards, Dixieland stuff and blues ballads, not in any particular order
> and not a superfluous nuance in his entire repertoire. Songs that were
> delicate, expansive, personal, historical, or ethereal, you name it. He put
> everything into a hat and -- presto -- put a new thing out in the sun. I
> was greatly influence by Dave. Later, when I would record my first album,
> half the cuts on it were renditions of songs that Van Ronk did. It's not
> like I planned it, it just happened. Unconsciously I trusted his stuff more
> than I did mine.
>
> Van Ronk was born in 1936, an age that gave him some proximity to the
> tumultuous changes wrought by the Great Depression, including a labor
> movement that remained restive until the late 1940s. His initial musical
> affinities, however, were not with the social protest music of a Woody
> Guthrie or a Josh White but with traditional or Dixieland jazz. Despite
> lacking a golden throat, his first gigs were as a singer. It was sheer
> volume that opened up doors, especially in low-rent clubs lacking a sound
> system. As some wit put it, to quote Van Ronk, "When Van Ronk takes a
> vocal, the hogs are restless for miles around."
>
> Of course, the folk revival was in itself an attempt to redefine what was
> beautiful. For every singer with an angelic voice like Joan Baez's, there
> were others who got by on sheer personality, like Bob Dylan. For a
> generation that had become jaded by white rock-and-rollers like Pat Boone,
> having a raspy but genuine instrument was more than adequate. Although
> there are very few sound tracks on the Internet (other than the 20-second
> clips at amazon.com) that capture Van Ronk in performance, author Elijah
> Wald does include Take A Whiff on Me, (http://www.elijahwald.com/whiff.ram)
> which he describes as a "taste of how Dave sounded in his formative years,
> around the time he was recording his first Folkways album." It is essential
> Van Ronk, combining superior guitar technique, unabashed enthusiasm and a
> keen sense of phrasing -- essential for any vocalist.
>
> full: http://www.swans.com/library/art12/lproy38.html
>
> --
>
> www.marxmail.org
>
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