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

death of performing the music of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton for drunken undergraduates who wanted us to put on funny hats and sing “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” Even if I had been able to stomach it, that scene was all but dead, and there was no GI bill for veterans of the mouldy fig wars. It was clear that my career plans were due for an agonizing reappraisal, and unless I wanted to get out of music entirely, folk music was the only way I could jump. So I cast off my carefully cultivated jazz snobbery and set out to reinvent myself as a fingerpicking guitarist and singer. Like the man said, “Sometimes you have to forget your principles and do what’s right.”

3
    Folk Roots and Libertarian Anarchy
    B efore embarking on the saga of the Greenwich Village scene in the formative years of the Great Folk Scare, I should probably provide a little background. First of all, the whole concept of what is meant by the word “folksinger” has changed dramatically since I came on the set. With the success of the singer-songwriters of the sixties (Dylan and Paxton and Ochs, oh my!), the scene became dominated by music that we would not even have considered part of the genre.
    In the 1950s, as for at least the previous two hundred years, we used the word “folk” to describe a process rather than a style. By this definition—to which I still subscribe—folk songs are the musical expression of preliterate or illiterate communities and necessarily pass directly from singer to singer. Flamenco is folk music; Bulgarian vocal ensembles are folk music; African drumming is folk music; and “Barbara Allen” is folk music. Clearly, there is little stylistic similarity here, but all these musics developed through a process of oral repetition that is akin to the game we used to call “whisper.” In whisper, one person writes down a sentence, then whispers it to another, who whispers it to a third, and so on around the room until the last person hears it and again writes it down; and then the two messages are compared,
and often turn out to be wildly disparate. In the same way, if one follows songs that have been passed down through the oral folk tradition, one finds that lines like “Savory, sage, rosemary, and thyme” become “Miss Mary says come marry in time,” and “Jordan is a hard road to travel” becomes “Yearning in your heart for trouble.” The cumulative effect is a sort of Darwinian evolution that first produces different versions of the same song, and eventually leads to entirely new songs. It follows that the original authors of folk songs are usually unknown, and even when we do know something about them, the information is not necessarily relevant.
    To an overwhelming extent, this folk process has been short-circuited in the developed world over the last hundred years or so, first by widespread literacy and later by the phonograph, radio, and TV. As a result, with the exception of a few holdouts—some rap and street poetry, kids’ game rhymes, bawdy songs, and so forth—there is very little folk music in modern-day America. (Please don’t hit me with that banjo.) It follows that the concept of a “folk revival” is oxymoronic. And yet, self-announced folk revivals keep surfacing, just as they have at least since the days of Sir Walter Scott. The impulse behind them is generally romantic and anti-industrial—and, a bit surprisingly, among Anglophones in recent times it has almost always come from politically left of center. (Elsewhere, interest in folkloric traditions has often been found in combination with extreme nationalism of the most right-wing and fascist variety.)
    One of the first things that must be understood about these revivals is that the folk have very little to do with them. Always, there is a middle-class constituency, and its idea of the folk—whoever that might be—is the operative thing. The particular risorgimento in which I took part had begun some fifteen years prior to my