Dave Van Ronk (1936 - 2002)

These notes are simply my personal thoughts about one of my great heroes. The best available online resource for Dave Van Ronk is Jeff Kenney's Dave Van Ronk Unauthorised page and if you are at all interested in DVR you should visit it.

The first time I heard and saw Dave Van Ronk was at a Cambridge Folk Festival in 1981. He was in the giant tent which comprised Main Stage 1 and I was somewhere towards the back watching this shambolic figure weave magic from his old Guild F-50 guitar and his by turns gruff and tender voice. Somebody behind me muttered "This guy has too much class for a dump like this" - and he was right.

The essence of a great guitarist is not just mastery of the fretboard or of a particular style, not technique and certainly not speed: it is control. DVR could play anything and at one time or another probably did, but the essence of his playing throughout his recording career was control which manifested itself in two ways. Firstly in his immaculate playing of instrumental pieces which, to my ears at least, reached its summit on Scott Joplin's 'Maple Leaf Rag' and Jelly Roll Morton's 'The Pearls' which both appear on 1976's 'Sunday Street'. Secondly it lies in the way that he never allowed his guitar playing to distract from his voice or unbalance the delivery of a song.

His recording career stretched from the 1959 to 2001 and spanned many styles from the folk/blues of the early Folkways recordings, to a flirtation with rock on Dave Van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters, to a jug band recording of Peter and the Wolf, to jazz standards. Along the way he threw in a definitive version of Tom Paxton's 'Did You Hear John Hurt?' amongst others. All were approached with a seriousness which occasionally could border on the earnest but mostly with the sense of fun that led to his own 'Mr Noah' and 'Gaslight Rag'

It can't honestly always be said that his albums survive the test of time - particularly those from the late sixties/early seventies - but even the poor ones contain gems for afficionados. The assessments of the albums on Jeff Kenney's page are pretty accurate but for what its worth my own favourites of the albums which I have heard (13 down, probably 20 more to find) are 1995's 'From...Another Time & Place', 'Sunday Street', 1983's 'Statesboro Blues' and the early material through to around 1962 (his hard driving 'Samson and Delilah' on 1962's 'Dave Van Ronk, Folksinger' is a gem). Also worth seeking out is 'Foc'sle Songs and Shanties' by Paul Clayton and the Foc'sle Singers' released by Folkways in 1959 and currently available by mail order on cd from the Smithsonian in Washington DC. DVR is one of the Foc'sle Singers and the whole album is made all the better by their apparently fundamental error of rehearsing in a bar and recording with the assistance of demerara rum. Recorded in one session DVR later claimed, I think correctly, that it was 'one of the best records I have ever had anything to do with'.

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Version 1: posted 23 June 2002