Review: Dave Van Ronk - Sings Ballads, Blues, And Spirituals (1959)
Tracks: 1) Duncan And Brady; 2) Black Mountain Blues; 3) In The Pines; 4) My Baby’s So Sweet; 5) Twelve Gates To The City; 6) Winin’ Boy; 7) If You Leave Me Pretty Momma; 8) Backwater Blues; 9) Careless Love; 10) Betty And Dupree; 11) K. C. Moan; 12) Gambler’s Blues; 13) John Henry; 14) How Long.
REVIEW
Like (probably) most people of my own and following generations, I first came across the quirky name «Dave Van Ronk» while reading a Bob Dylan biography — just a couple years before a small window of opportunity opened up for old Dave in 2004 (with Dylan himself publishing Chronicles Vol. 1, in which he wrote a bit about his Greenwich Village mentors) and then reached its peak with the Coen Bros.’ release of Inside Llewyn Davis, loosely based on Van Ronk’s life story. Van Ronk himself never got to enjoy this brief popularity resurgence, having passed away in 2002, and while it did briefly dust off some memories, it is probably safe to say that, just like Odetta and many other talented performers from the golden years of American folk revival, Van Ronk will forever be ensconced as an auxiliary figure, an important historical medium in the transition from Leadbelly to Bob Dylan and nothing more. He may be «Mayor of MacDougal Street», but whoever remembers all those lists of mayors, anyway?
While contemplating oblivion is always a little sad, it only takes one listen to Van Ronk’s debut album for Folkways Records to admit that in this case, oblivion is at least understandable, if not entirely justified. Dave Van Ronk was a passionate and gifted musician and performer, but he was also a humble soul — and while humility is king when it comes to general human beings, in case of artists it really places them at a disadvantage. Already on his first album, recorded after several years of practice and musical growth, Dave Van Ronk comes across as a skilled guitar player and an efficient singer with a unique (for his time, at least) vocal tone — but he writes none of his songs, and does his best to let you understand that the ones that he covers are being transmitted by him to the general public, rather than reinterpreted for a modern age.
Like most of his Greenwich Village peers, Van Ronk’s chief inspiration came from the old recordings of the 1920s and early Depression-era 1930s — the track list on this album specifically indicates Leadbelly, Reverend Gary Davis, and Bessie Smith as the key figures inspiring the young Irish performer. His acoustic guitar playing is not intended to specifically imitate the style of any of the pre-war folk-blues greats — it owes a lot to the techniques of Mississippi John Hurt and Gary Davis, but, as a rule, merges them all in Dave’s own technique: nicely syncopated, clean, steady, precise, unhurrying, pleasant, but not terribly exciting. If there is one thing that separates his playing from the likes of all those guys, as well as Big Bill Broonzy and whatever other authentic acoustic-blues black performers were still playing the revival circuits in the 1950s, it is the total lack of «flash» and «showmanship»: throughout the album, the man’s hands remain calm as a cucumber, as if playing guitar for him was like steering a ship through the reefs (he did spend time in the Merchant Marine, after all, before settling on the role of folk music artist).
This might seem a bit weird next to all those pictures of Van Ronk’s dishevelled appearance and poetic descriptions such as Robert Shelton’s likening him to "an unmade bed strewn with books, record jackets, pipes, empty whiskey bottles, lines from obscure poets, finger picks, and broken guitar strings", but appearances can be deceiving. Van Ronk may have looked like an early prototype of Captain Beefheart, and he may even have had a voice that could sound like an early prototype of Captain Beefheart, but unlike Captain Beefheart, he seems to have generally been a sane, rational, «normal» person, just one with relatively little use for certain basic social conventions of American white society at the time (such as a primal hatred for «socialism», whatever that term could mean for anybody). And more than anything, that type of sanity is well reflected in his music — all these covers sound professional, sincere, imbued with feeling, and... just a tad boring.
The key element here, in 1959, was not so much Van Ronk’s guitar playing as his voice. Gruff, nasal, croaky, yet at the same time highly melodic, it was the most «earthy» Greenwich Village could ever get — Pete Seeger and the entire Kingston Trio sounded like Toddlerville next to this guy with his howling and wheezing. Of course, in his own turn Van Ronk would sound like a toddler next to the likes of Blind Willie Johnson or Charley Patton; but in 1959, Blind Willie Johnson and Charley Patton were dead, and those of their African-American peers who were still alive and vocally comparable did not bother to set up residence in Greenwich Village (though a few younger people did, like Odetta). To many in New York City, Dave Van Ronk was as close as you could get to actually hearing the true spirit of these old songs — including Dylan, whose vocal style on his early acoustic records is very much influenced by Van Ronk, at least through the very idea that you don’t necessarily have to have a «pretty» voice to be a folk singer.
In retrospect, however, it is difficult not to acknowledge that an album like this was far more important at a certain place and in a certain time than it ever could be anywhere and anytime else. While all the recordings sound pleasant on their own, I made an effort to specifically play some of them back-to-back with the earlier tracks they were based on, and in almost every case, Van Ronk... well, not so much «loses» to the original, but rather just fails to demonstrate what makes his own interpretation worth being treasured separately. Thus, the lone «spiritual» of this album — ‘Oh, What A Beautiful City’ — follows the classic Rev. Gary Davis recording from 1935, which is more engaging musically (reflecting Davis’ «piano-like» style of playing the guitar) and more moving vocally; Van Ronk drastically simplifies the melody and leaves the religious ecstasy of the Reverend’s performance without, so it seems to me, managing to preserve the pain and suffering reflected in the performance. The latter choice may have been conscious, because for Dave, sincerity and honesty was key, and he could not imitate what he did not feel himself; but this, of course, ends up somewhat eviscerating the purpose of the song.
The same goes for ‘Gambler’s Blues’, otherwise known as ‘St. James’ Infirmary’, a song that has been covered by just about anybody in the business, but very rarely done just right. Of all the versions I know, Van Ronk’s stands closest to Jimmie Rodgers’ cover from 1932, and while Jimmie’s voice was never as «earthy» as Dave’s, his soft, trembling, quasi-weeping high pitch delivery emphasized the tragedy of the song’s lyrics far sharper than Van Ronk’s performance. It is almost ironic, since Rodgers’ vocalization is more theatrical and manneristic, while Dave tries hard to imitate the realistic grittiness of a wasted barroom client — yet there is something here that makes me want to give poor Jimmie a hug, while at the same time moving my chair away from Van Ronk’s spot, just for safety reasons.
Perhaps the only one of those old performers against whom Dave can more or less hold his own is Leadbelly. Unlike Gary Davis or Mississippi John Hurt, Leadbelly was not a great or particularly idiosyncratic guitar player, and his singing was more like an entertaining storyteller’s than a passionate artist’s, which gives Dave a chance to steal away a song or two from Huddie Ledbetter’s vast repertoire. His ‘John Henry’, for instance, is delivered with more playing and singing frenzy than Leadbelly ever thought necessary for the song, which is fairly consistent with the song’s traditional narrative of Man Vs. Machine; more importantly, both Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy sing the song rather playfully, with the tragedy implied by the narrative rather than conveyed by the singing and playing, whereas Dave goes about it bluntly and openly. Likewise, his rendition of the creepy ballad ‘In The Pines’ (a.k.a. ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’) is, at least on the surface, more lyrical and caring than Leadbelly’s — although cynical tongues might add that he is just doing that to make the material more palatable for his white audiences. But then again, what alternatives could one really have in the middle of Greenwich Village? Move to the Delta?
All in all, I won’t lie and pretend that the album holds that much more than just historical significance for me. But it is pleasant to listen to if you are into folk-blues music at all, and it is interesting to compare these interpretations with the sources, just to see the evolution of the material from rowdy pre-war African-American context to rowdy post-war white socialist college student context in that brief time window before it either got commercialized à la Peter, Paul & Mary model or evolved into something completely different, like Bob Dylan or Phil Ochs. I dare say, though, that reading Dave Van Ronk’s autobiography (The Mayor Of MacDougal Street) is probably a more fascinating way to plunge yourself into the reality of those epochal times than just listening to his music.