The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk Read Free Book Online

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