Recorded during his brief flirtation with major record labels, it is also one of the most tasteful examples of how he could sound with a full studio orchestra framing his voice. He recorded a half-dozen of her compositions in various settings and all are well worth hearing, but this is probably his definitive Mitchell performance. Urge for Going (Joni Mitchell, recorded 1971, from Dave Van Ronk )ĭave thought Joni Mitchell was the finest songwriter to come out of the folk revival, and she thought he was the finest interpreter of her songs. He was one of the few people in the revival who understood that blues can be funny as well as tragic, and that there are smart, respectful ways to refit old traditions for new times.
Dave was forced to sing this at every show for many years, and his response was to have fun with it, undercutting the world-weary quality of the chorus and highlighting the wry humor of the verses. Though Gary Davis taught him the basic song and guitar arrangement, it was largely his own creation, assembled from various sources and extensively rewritten. “Cocaine” was Dave’s most famous song of the early 1960s, recorded on his groundbreaking Folk Singer LP. Gary Davis, recorded 1967, from Live at Sir George Williams University ) From Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag, it shows Dave’s astute sense of the guitar’s possibilities: rather than his usual fingerpicking style, he strums a rhythmic accompaniment that provides a solid foundation for one of his most soulful vocal performances. This was always one of my personal favorites from Dave’s repertoire. Wanderin’ (traditional, recorded 1964, from Just Dave Van Ronk ) According to Dave, Bob wrote this on a bet and he recorded it because he couldn’t resist, and it remains one of his most exuberant recordings. All Over You (Bob Dylan, recorded 1963, from In the Tradition / Two Sides of Dave Van Ronk )īacked by the Red Onion Jazz Band, this romping, shouting performance of obscure Dylaniana gives a sense of Dave’s musical roots and proves that even in 1963 neither he nor Dylan was entirely devoted to folk music. His playing is spare, understated, and unlike any previous blues guitar chart, and his vocal phrasing is steeped in jazz and delivered in a gruff whisper that underlines the power of the lyric. This was one of Dave’s most imitated guitar arrangements, adapted from his friend and sometime accompanist Dave Woods, and it perfectly showcases the way he transformed and personalized older material. Come Back Baby (Walter Davis, recorded 1962, from Folk Singer / Inside Dave Van Ronk ) For a fuller sense of his work, there is a comprehensive guide to his recordings at my website. For people who don’t know his work, this list of ten tracks is a good place to start, but only scrapes the surface of his oeuvre, with emphasis on his foundational blues arrangements and some original compositions.
#Dave van ronk going back to brooklyn rar movie
The movie includes some songs from his repertoire and some anecdotes from his life, and one of its side effects is that all of his recordings from the 1960s and 1970s have been reissued, at least in digital formats.
Louis Tickle,” was a supreme interpreter of Bertolt Brecht and Joni Mitchell and a distinctive songwriter in his own right, and mentored several generations of New York artists, from Bob Dylan to Christine Lavin and the Speakeasy Collective of the 1980s.ĭave died in 2002, but he is getting a belated rediscovery thanks to Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers’ film loosely inspired by his memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street. But that was only one facet of Dave’s work: he had started out as a New Orleans-style jazz singer, became the defining figure in the acoustic blues revival, invented modern ragtime guitar with his arrangement of “St. On the cusp of the 1960s, Dave Van Ronk was the king of the Greenwich Village folk scene and one of the central shapers of the aesthetic he later dubbed “neo-ethnic” – musicians who not only loved old folk songs, but wanted to sing them in authentic rural styles.
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