Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est the Same Shit

Reading Dave Van Ronk as Fascists Prepare Another Red Scare

Dave Van Ronk and Terri Thal on the roof of their apartment building, Greenwich Village 1963

It feels a bit like a “phoney war” here in the US at the moment – we’re in the lull before a storm that will undoubtedly start soon, on January 20^th or shortly thereafter. I’ve been spending it by the fireside reading Dave Van Ronk, the bitterly funny guitarist and singer who died in 2002 but left us a memoir of what he witnessed in the 20^th century, The Mayor of MacDougal Street. (Some might know a bunch of its anecdotes – but little of their real context – from the Coen Brothers’ film “Inside Llewyn Davis,” a fiction that made free use of Van Ronk’s life stories.)

Van Ronk was a Brooklyn-born, Queens-raised kid who dropped out of school at fifteen and apprenticed himself instead to jazz musicians. His vocabulary includes some great old salty jazz slang, peppered with French and German and Yiddish phrases. But it was folk and blues that drew Van Ronk to a life-long career as a guitarist, fingerpicking traditional tunes in styles he learned from other young players in Washington Square Park, from old 78s, from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music when that came out, and ultimately from the artists who made pre-war recordings and then resurfaced during the “folk revival” of the late 50s and early 60s. In 1963, a record collector travelled to a town mentioned in a blues by Mississippi John Hurt and found John Hurt himself to invite back north. Next thing Van Ronk knew, the 70-year-old Hurt was gigging in Boston and New York, and they were hanging out. Others of that generation followed.

“Skip James showed up a year or so after John, and did a week at the Gaslight on a double bill with Doc Watson. Lightnin’ Hopkins was around pretty regularly, as was John Lee Hooker. Those guys were an integral part of the scene, as much as people like me and Dylan and Ochs, and that is one reason that I tend to cock a jaundiced eye at the recurring rumors of another folk revival… Unless we can hatch another generation like Gary [Davis], Skip, and John, or John Lee and Muddy Waters, the quality will be sadly second-rate – and the world that produced these people is long gone.”

From the perspective of 2024, the world that produced Van Ronk, Dylan and Ochs is long gone too. But some things don’t change, which makes The Mayor of MacDougal Street an eerily familiar read on a number of topics. Chief among them is the “culture war” – or as it was known in Van Ronk’s day, the Red Scare. Passages can read like messages from the future rather than the past, written by someone who has already lived through what lies ahead:

“The Red Scare that began in the late 1940s involved this country in one of the most disgracefully psychotic episodes in its history, and the blacklist damn near killed the folk revival in its tracks. The full extent of the witch hunt is rarely acknowledged even today. Most people believe it affected only public figures – people in government and the entertainment world – but that is completely wrong. Trade unions and the professions in the private sector were all profoundly affected, and for a while no one to the left of Genghis Khan could feel entirely safe. Thousands of people lost their jobs and were harassed by the FBI and threatened by vigilante anti-Communist crusaders. I had to sign a loyalty oath to get a job as a messenger, for chrissake… The right-wing press – which is to say, almost all of it – was running stories like ‘How the Reds Control Our Schools,’ and the whole country was in a paranoid panic that lasted almost two decades. Leftists and intellectuals were terrorized, many essentially unemployable, not a few in prison.”

The effect of the culture war in the 1950s on young musicians feels familiar as well. “Those of us in the younger generation,” Van Ronk writes, “had essentially nothing to lose. We didn’t have to worry about somebody pulling a concert hall out from under us, because no one in his right mind would have put us in a concert hall in the first place.” While their elders suffered material losses to the blacklist, and some soft-pedalled their politics as a result, Van Ronk’s peers “were very open about their radicalism.” And they were flat broke.

An impossibly young Dave Van Ronk

These younger musicians organized, for a time, forming a “Folksingers Guild” to protest unfair pay from the newly-founded folk clubs in Greenwich Village. It didn’t really work – so they started promoting their own shows instead, booking venues and paying the artists more generously from the door. They started their own broadside, slamming what they saw as conformism from bigger record labels and commercial venues. Van Ronk took on Elektra in the very first issue of the mimeographed Caravan, August 1957, writing under the pseudonym “Blind Rafferty”:

“Even at my angriest, I cannot truthfully say that many of Elektra’s records are actually ‘bad.’ They lack even that much character. The aim of the A and R men seems to be to avoid frightening or offending anyone… I am amazed at Elektra’s ability to turn out one innocuous little album right after another – genteel, sophisticated, and utterly false.”

And I thought my generation invented the snide zine!

The way Van Ronk describes his committed and not a little desperate subculture of the 1950s gives me at least a glimmer of hope as we enter this dark period. The enemies of the Red Scare banded together, as much as their personalities and differing politics allowed. And that phase of the culture war did eventually end – McCarthy was repudiated, the civil rights movement happened, Pete Seeger even got back on TV.

Meanwhile, in the music microcosm of Greenwich Village, Albert Grossman earned first Peter Paul and Mary and then Bob Dylan an absolute mint as they broke out of the leftist underground and into a changing mainstream. This last bit wasn’t entirely welcomed by the hardcore like Van Ronk, who might have been “Paul” if he hadn’t turned Grossman down for a part in what he judged would be a lame “village-spawned Kingston Trio.” And while he was an early and steadfast supporter of Dylan’s talent and didn’t begrudge him success, he had no patience for “the sycophants” who turned up as fame took hold. When Dylan, riding high and surrounded by his posse, advised Van Ronk to give up the blues and produce an album that could make him too a fortune, Van Ronk “pushed back my chair and said, ‘Dylan, if you’re so rich, how come you ain’t smart?’ And I walked out.”

with Dylan and Suze Rotolo, 1963

Thus two ways to survive a culture war. At the moment, I’m less interested in arguments about which was better - I’m just glad to know there are paths that come out the other side. We all need to find one.

Listening to: Melos Kalpa

Cooking: tofu scramble