dave van ronk going back to brooklyn rar

Van Ronk once said, ''but we couldn't stop them from putting it out.'' He made his first recording, ''Skiffle in Stereo,'' in 1958 as a member of the Orange Blossom Jug Five. The folk singer Odetta encouraged him to perform, and by 1957 he was singing in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. He was one of many city dwellers who fell in love with the rough-hewn profundity of older rural music. He started playing guitar in grade school, and in high school he played tenor banjo with an amateur group. If the Hot Five cost a dollar and a half and the Blind Lemon Jefferson cost 35 cents, if you're a 14-year-old kid, what are you going to do?'' ''And I ran across a Blind Lemon Jefferson. ''I went to the Jazz Record Center looking to pick up a Hot Five recording,'' he said, referring to Louis Armstrong's group.

He turned to blues, he once recalled, as a result of record collecting. His grandfather had played ragtime piano at Catskill Mountain resorts, and Dave grew up listening to jazz on the radio. Van Ronk was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1936. For more than 40 years he worked the folk circuit of clubs, coffeehouses and festivals, and he made two dozen albums. He was nicknamed the Mayor of Macdougal Street, and his apartment became a gathering place for folk musicians of his own generation and the ones that followed, among them Tom Paxton, Janis Ian, Christine Lavin and Suzanne Vega. Van Ronk had three essential qualities for his role in the folk revival of the 1950's and 60's: a sense of history, a sense of humor and a gift for making fellow musicians feel at home. The cause was colon cancer, said his manager, Mitchell Greenhill. He was 65 and lived in Greenwich Village. Dave Van Ronk, the gravel-voiced, ragtime-picking patriarch of the Greenwich Village folk scene, died on Sunday in Manhattan.

Dave van ronk going back to brooklyn rar