The Mayor of MacDougal Street

by Dave Van Ronk

  The audience, of course, never noticed a thing.

  As I was rapidly discovering, it is hard work surviving without a steady job. I could usually come up with a floor or a couch to crash on, but food was always a problem. We would have boosting expeditions—I never actually did this myself, but I was certainly party to the proceeds—where a group would go into a supermarket and secrete some small, high-value items such as caviar and potted shrimp about their persons. Then we would go out and shop these things off to our more affluent friends for bags of rice and bulk items that were too big to shoplift.

  We would head out in the early morning on what we used to call the “dawn patrol.” We would hit people’s stoops at about four-thirty or five and get milk, eggs, sometimes even bread, and one copy each of the New York Times. A bunch of us were crashing more or less regularly in a loft on the Bowery, so we got a lot of tips from the local winos. There was a birdseed factory right down the block, and if you got there for shape-up, those fortunate enough to be chosen would have the opportunity of unloading fifty-pound sacks of birdseed. I did that sometimes, and as it happened, the birdseed was marijuana, and in those days they didn’t irradiate the stuff, so among other things we had a little farm going by the stove. Very nice, until one day the cat got at it. Somehow, though, heaving around fifty-pound sacks of marijuana took a lot of the romance out of dope for me.

  I did all kinds of things. I was a bank messenger for a while—an insane business that is perfectly captured in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn—and I did a little factory work. (I used to say that I had an assembly-line job dotting the eyes on Mickey Mouse dolls, which is not quite true, but close enough.) I knew a guy who had a catering service, and sometimes he would hire me when he had a big party, which paid a few bucks and also had some side benefits: there was often food left over, and once the customers got a bit tipsy, we would ferret away a bottle of champagne for every couple we served.

  If worst came to worst, there were always day jobs busing tables in an Automat. However, by the mid-1950s I was getting involved with radical politics, and being a lefty could be an occupational hazard in even the most minor occupations. My friend Lenny was working a restaurant job, and the FBI came around and started asking his boss questions about a suspicious, dangerous character who was waiting tables, and of course the guy fired him.

  There was also the problem of keeping clean. We had to do things like mooch showers. Haircuts were to be had only at the barber college down on the Bowery—either that or we’d cut each other’s hair. We couldn’t afford to get our clothes cleaned. We would gradually get grungier and grungier, and eventually you would be so grungy that they wouldn’t even hire you to bus tables.

  There were compensations, though. Our loft was at 15 Cooper Square, which was right across the street from the original Five Spot, and in those days Thelonious Monk was playing there as sort of a steady thing. We would go over and sit at the bar in the afternoon, and Monk would be there with his musicians, rehearsing and working out new tunes. Beer was ten or fifteen cents in the afternoon, and you could sit and listen to Monk and Coltrane and that band. As icing on the cake, off to the side there was an old-time telephone booth with accordion doors, and every now and again the band would take a break and somebody would go in there and roll a joint. Around five or six o’clock, when the prices changed, the band went home to get ready for the evening’s show, and we would go into the telephone booth, and in the cracks of the door would be roaches. Those guys did not smoke lemonade; they had really good dope, so we would collect all these roaches and make new joints out of them, and get bombed out of our birds, basically on the house.

  There was actually a lot of good music around that you could hear for free. I remember hearing Alexander Schneider conducting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in Washington Square Park. And then, of course, there were the folksingers. Thanks to my Virgil, Rochelle, I had been introduced to the Sunday afternoon hootenannies in Washington Square at the outset of my descent into the Village. However, any interest I might have had in folk music had gone by the boards as soon as I cast my lot with the jazz fraternity, because if there was one thing that all jazz musicians could agree on, it was that folk music was irredeemably square. We thought of it as “hillbilly shit,” a bunch of guys who didn’t even know how to play their instruments and just got by with “cowboy chords.” The little I heard while passing through the Square on Sundays confirmed my newfound snobbishness. It was essentially summer camp music, songs these kids had learned at progressive camps that I came to think of generically as Camp Gulag on the Hudson. The sight and sound of all those happily howling petit bourgeois Stalinists offended my assiduously nurtured self-image as a hipster, not to mention my political sensibilities, which had become vehemently IWW-anarchist. They were childish, and nothing bothers a serious-minded eighteen-year-old as much as childishness. So for a couple of years I avoided the place like the plague, for fear of contamination. If I had to pass anywhere in the vicinity, I would walk through as quickly as possible, obviating any possibility that I might get sucked in by something like “Blue Tail Fly” and shortly find myself doing the hora around the fountain and singing “Hey Lolly, Lolly Lo.”

  Eventually, though, I came to realize that there were some very good musicians operating on the fringes of the radical Rotarian sing-alongs. People like Tom Paley, Dick Rosmini, and Fred Gerlach were playing music cognate with early jazz, and doing it with a subtlety and directness that blew me away. I had heard that kind of playing before, but only on old 78s that I had picked up by chance while searching for jazz discs. At that time you couldn’t just go out and buy an LP reissue of people like Mississippi John Hurt or Robert Johnson. In fact, the LP format had been introduced only a few years earlier. (I still have RL 101, the very first Riverside ten-inch record, a thing called Louis Armstrong Plays the Blues. At first I was very annoyed to find that instead of Louis solo, it was him backing blues singers like Chippie Hill and Ma Rainey. Then I started to listen and liked it very much.) If I wanted to find a lot of the older jazz stuff, I had to go out and look for used 78s. There was a place on 47th Street, the Jazz Record Center, which we called “Engine Joe’s,” and it was a treasure trove of jazz and jazz-related music of all sorts; it had writing on the stairs as you went up, saying, “Everything from Bunk to Monk,” which the mouldy figs misquoted as “from Bunk to junk.” There would be these stacks of records that you could look through, and some cost as much as ten bucks, but there were also some for twenty-five cents. They would have Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith, and also all kinds of people that I had never heard of before, like Bumble Bee Slim and Furry Lewis. So what the hell, for two bits you could afford to indulge your curiosity.

  I was never really a collector, because I was sleeping on floors and that sort of thing, and for record collecting you need a stable place to live. Still, I picked up a few 78s, and a lot of people I knew were accumulating collections—for a while there, you did not factor into the scene at all unless you could discuss cactus needles intelligently—so I had access to a fair amount of material. Also, the reissue series were beginning, and I shortly picked up a ten-inch record called Listen to Our Story, which Alan Lomax had put together for Decca. It was a collection of ballads that had originally been issued on 78s, most of them by white hillbilly singers, but it included “Stackolee” by Furry Lewis and a thing called “True Religion” by Reverend Edward Clayborn, both with fingerpicked guitar.

  When I heard “Stackolee,” I assumed it was two guitars, one playing the bass line and the other playing the melody. I had no idea that there was such a thing as fingerpicking. My idea of playing guitar was either chopping fours—playing rhythm chords—or something like what Charlie Christian did. Then, sometime around 1954 or 1955, I happened to be walking across Washington Square Park of a Sunday afternoon, and I noticed this guy playing an old New York Martin, a very small, very sweet guitar, and he was doing something that
sounded an awful lot like “Stackolee.” It immediately grabbed my attention, because he was doing the whole thing by himself: his thumb was picking out the bass notes while he was playing the melody with his fingers. I had never seen anything like that, so I stood there and listened, and when he stopped playing, I immediately buttonholed him and asked him to show me what he was doing. That was Tom Paley, who later became a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers. He was very nice, and graciously answered all my dumb questions, slowed the whole thing down, and gave me the general gist of how it worked.7

  The advantages of fingerpicking were immediately obvious to me, because what I really wanted to do was sing and that style of playing was ideal for accompanying yourself. I rushed home to my guitar and went to work. I have never applied myself to any project with such intensity before or since. Paley had provided the key, but mastering the technique took time. I did not take any lessons—there was nobody around then, as far as I knew, who was giving any—but Sunday after Sunday I hit Washington Square, watching other fingerstyle guitar players, meeting them, and picking their brains. A few of them lived in the Village, but most were still living with their parents in the burbs. I made friends like Barry Kornfeld and Dick Rosmini, who were already picking like sonofabitches. Gradually, I improved—we all did, actually. When one of us figured something out, the knowledge would be shared, and our general level of skill rose. It was a combined process of experimentation and theft: you would come up with an idea, and the next thing you knew, all your friends would be playing it, but that was fine because when they came up with an idea, you would be playing it. As Machiavelli used to say, “Things proceed in a circle, and thus the empire is maintained.”

  Thus began my shift from jazz to folk music, a change that defied the general rule that things evolve from the simple to the more complex. In this case I made a move that was technically retrogressive, but it was about the only thing I could do to survive. I was a high school dropout, so there was no chance that I was going to become a professor of comparative philology or a nuclear physicist who played the guitar on the side. And much as I loved traditional jazz, I was sick to death of performing the music of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton for drunken undergraduates who wanted us to put on funny hats and sing “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” Even if I had been able to stomach it, that scene was all but dead, and there was no GI bill for veterans of the mouldy fig wars. It was clear that my career plans were due for an agonizing reappraisal, and unless I wanted to get out of music entirely, folk music was the only way I could jump. So I cast off my carefully cultivated jazz snobbery and set out to reinvent myself as a fingerpicking guitarist and singer. Like the man said, “Sometimes you have to forget your principles and do what’s right.”

  3

  Folk Roots and Libertarian Anarchy

  Before embarking on the saga of the Greenwich Village scene in the formative years of the Great Folk Scare, I should probably provide a little background. First of all, the whole concept of what is meant by the word “folksinger” has changed dramatically since I came on the set. With the success of the singer-songwriters of the sixties (Dylan and Paxton and Ochs, oh my!), the scene became dominated by music that we would not even have considered part of the genre.

  In the 1950s, as for at least the previous two hundred years, we used the word “folk” to describe a process rather than a style. By this definition—to which I still subscribe—folk songs are the musical expression of preliterate or illiterate communities and necessarily pass directly from singer to singer. Flamenco is folk music; Bulgarian vocal ensembles are folk music; African drumming is folk music; and “Barbara Allen” is folk music. Clearly, there is little stylistic similarity here, but all these musics developed through a process of oral repetition that is akin to the game we used to call “whisper.” In whisper, one person writes down a sentence, then whispers it to another, who whispers it to a third, and so on around the room until the last person hears it and again writes it down; and then the two messages are compared, and often turn out to be wildly disparate. In the same way, if one follows songs that have been passed down through the oral folk tradition, one finds that lines like “Savory, sage, rosemary, and thyme” become “Miss Mary says come marry in time,” and “Jordan is a hard road to travel” becomes “Yearning in your heart for trouble.” The cumulative effect is a sort of Darwinian evolution that first produces different versions of the same song, and eventually leads to entirely new songs. It follows that the original authors of folk songs are usually unknown, and even when we do know something about them, the information is not necessarily relevant.

  To an overwhelming extent, this folk process has been short-circuited in the developed world over the last hundred years or so, first by widespread literacy and later by the phonograph, radio, and TV. As a result, with the exception of a few holdouts—some rap and street poetry, kids’ game rhymes, bawdy songs, and so forth—there is very little folk music in modern-day America. (Please don’t hit me with that banjo.) It follows that the concept of a “folk revival” is oxymoronic. And yet, self-announced folk revivals keep surfacing, just as they have at least since the days of Sir Walter Scott. The impulse behind them is generally romantic and anti-industrial—and, a bit surprisingly, among Anglophones in recent times it has almost always come from politically left of center. (Elsewhere, interest in folkloric traditions has often been found in combination with extreme nationalism of the most right-wing and fascist variety.)

  One of the first things that must be understood about these revivals is that the folk have very little to do with them. Always, there is a middle-class constituency, and its idea of the folk—whoever that might be—is the operative thing. The particular risorgimento in which I took part had begun some fifteen years prior to my arrival and grew out of the leftist movements of the Depression era. Desperate strikes, unemployment, and vast hordes of dispossessed small farmers engaged the sympathy and support of the middle class, which was pretty hard-hit itself. Enter the Communist Party. Communist organizers assisted tenant farmers in setting up unions in the South and Southwest, and supported rent strikes and anti-eviction campaigns in black ghettos in the Northeast, which, along with an anti-lynching campaign, established links with the black community. In spite of their small numbers, the Communists seemed to be everywhere, and they were damned good organizers.

  In the course of their work among coal miners and textile workers in Appalachia, and with rural and ghetto blacks, some of the Communist field workers became aware of the music of the southern mountains and black singing traditions (especially gospel music). They saw these folk songs as social documents—I have heard people go to great lengths to prove that the most apolitical ditty was in fact a coded assault on the oppression of the workers—and also as potential organizing tools. At first, their enthusiasm met with little support among their urban counterparts. While they were celebrating eccentric hill-country balladeers like Aunt Molly Jackson, the cultural commissars were off on a crazed search for Communist art, encouraging sympathetic composers to write workers’ oratorios. Before long, though, these progressive masterpieces fell into well-deserved oblivion, and picket lines and rallies began to feature that now-familiar fixture, the “folksinger.”

  The urban intelligentsia had always been susceptible to nostalgic longings for “simpler” times and lifestyles, but it had tended to present its rural gleanings as an adjunct to the “art song.” Classical composers had produced settings of peasant airs and dances, which would be tossed in to lighten up programs of “serious music.” Medieval lyrics were presented as educational artifacts, and dreaded accordingly. The new wave of politically progressive folksingers was something different. The tuxedos and evening gowns of the concert hall were replaced by work clothes, in a spirit of proletarian unity.

  There was something else going on as well: a lot of both the middle-class left-wingers and the workers back in the 1930s were first- or second-generation immigrants, and the folk rev
ival served as a way for them to establish American roots. This was especially true for the Jews. The folk revivalists were at least 50 percent Jewish, and they adopted the music as part of a process of assimilation to the Anglo-American tradition—which itself was largely an artificial construct but nonetheless provided some common ground. (Of course, that rush to assimilate was not limited to Jews, but I think they were more conscious of what they were doing than a lot of other people were.) The more nativist “folk” were often embarrassingly aware of this fact. When Roger Sprung, one of the original Washington Square bluegrassers, showed up with a couple of his buddies at the Asheville Folk Festival in the early 1950s, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the festival organizer and a hard-shell North Carolinian, grilled them thoroughly before letting them perform.

  “You boys from New York?” he asked, with obvious suspicion.

  Roger said yes.

  “You Jews?”

  Roger said, “Uh, yeah.”

  “You know Pete Seeger?”

  “Well, we’ve met him . . . ”

  “You Communists?”

  No, they were not.

  Lunsford himself was a racist, anti-Semitic white supremacist who in later years would steadfastly refuse to come to the Newport Folk Festivals because of Seeger’s involvement. Nonetheless, he finally decided that Sprung and his cohorts were not Communists, and allowed them to appear. However, he was master of ceremonies, and when they were due to come on, he got up and announced, “Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to present the three Jews from New York.”