ELIZABETH ECKHART FOR TVD | Smack dab in the middle of the second side of Bob Dylan’s debut album is a rendition of the folk standard “The House of the Rising Sun,” listed as “House of the Risin’ Sun” on the record. For most listeners this version was the first they had heard of the song, or at least the first time they heard the song in that particularly poignant, minor key arrangement that was made even more popular by The Animals two years later. However, denizens of the booming Greenwich Village folk scene of the time recognized the arrangement as being cribbed from none other than scene mainstay Dave Van Ronk.
Like many folk artists of the period, Van Ronk took traditional songs and fragments of songs and made them his own. His version of “House of the Rising Sun” was particularly good, but being a public domain song he had no recourse as he watched both Dylan and The Animals launched into international stardom partially on the strength of his arrangement—with Van Ronk receiving no financial compensation or even credit from either of those artists.
As Bob Dylan quickly became one of the most famous and successful musicians in history, Van Ronk continued to labor in the scene in which Dylan was once his peer. However, like Dylan, Van Ronk did have his own special place in the Village.
Unlike singers such as Dylan who originated from the midwest, Dave Van Ronk was a born and bred New Yorker, growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s and ’50s. Van Ronk did not move to Greenwich Village to become part of the burgeoning folk music scene, but was actually one of the figures who ignited the neighborhood’s last great bohemian moment. Before becoming a local folk icon Van Ronk sang with barbershop quartets growing up, and his career as a professional musician began by playing banjo in traditional jazz bands.
However, by that point jazz was not as profitable as it once was, and Van Ronk found more success—or at the very least a few modestly paid gigs—finger-picking guitar and singing old blues and folk songs. Van Ronk’s renditions were not often straightforward, but were idiosyncratic in a way that lent immediacy and raw emotion to the material. Van Ronk’s interpretations of musical stylings pioneered largely by African Americans were inspiring to patrons of his performances, and he eventually managed to capture the interest of professionals in the New York recording industry.
And just as Dylan has been the subject of several recent biopics (including Martin Scorsese’s terrific No Direction Home: Bob Dylan which can now be streamed in its entirety through the DirecTV website), there has been a resurgence of interest in Van Ronk’s work thanks to the Coen brothers’ recent film Inside Llewyn Davis which depicts a fictionalized account of Van Ronk’s life.
A key distinction to be made between the Van Ronk movie and the Dylan movies, however, is that most of the Dylan movies feel gratuitously congratulatory. Inside Llewyn Davis, however, shows a floundering, unsuccessful recording artist, which serves the dramatic tone (and the narrative) of the film, but it isn’t entirely historically accurate unto itself. Van Ronk’s early records such as 1961’s Van Ronk Sings garnered enough attention to enable the singer to tour folk festivals and grow a following in the Village.
It was not just Van Ronk’s musicianship that ended up winning friends like Dylan, Paul Simon, and Leonard Cohen, but also his personality. With his large physical stature, unkempt appearance, intellectual disposition and outgoing nature, Van Ronk became the “mayor of MacDougal Street”—a far cry from the sad-sack, couch-surfing freeloader of the Coen brothers’ film. However, like the character Llewyn Davis, Van Ronk did travel to Chicago in an unsuccessful bid to sign with a prestigious producer, and Van Ronk also did fail to approach the heights of fame of many of his colleagues.
While Dave Van Ronk did not set out to be an influential folk musician, through happenstance he became one of the most iconic figures in the 1960s folk revival. Apart from a brief sojourn with folk-rock in the mid-60s, Van Ronk stuck with the type of music which made his name, even if he did not dogmatically stick with “folk” throughout his entire career. Van Ronk was active until his death in 2002, and the popularity and critical acclaim of Inside Llewyn Davis has renewed interest in this most unique of figures in music history.
