SECTION FIFTEEN
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COLUMN
SEVENTY, APRIL 1, 2002
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REMEMBERING DAVE VAN RONK
Subject:
Dave Van Ronk: Musician and mentor to the young Bob Dylan
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 18:01:10 -0800 (PST)
From: portsideMod <portsidemod@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: portside@yahoogroups.com
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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
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
"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
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
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
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
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.
Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ##
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