![]() ![]() Just to be noticed more, and have more people listen and understand what he was about."Īt his final concert, Van Ronk joked that there were lines around the block to see the Beat generation poets in Greenwich Village coffee houses. ![]() "And I think that would have been great for him. "It's very nice to just see people finally paying attention to his work more," Vuocolo says. Van Ronk's widow hopes this movie will do the same for her husband's legacy. The last time the Coens built a movie around music, the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? sold millions of copies and spurred an old-time music revival. Elijah Wald was able to finish the book using a combination of interviews and stories Van Ronk had told from the stage the memoir went on to inspire Inside Llewyn Davis. He wanted to write more about the whole neighborhood."īut Van Ronk died before he could write more than a few chapters of his memoir. You know, locals, a lot of petty thieves and odd characters. "And there were a lot of people hanging around the clubs who were not musicians. "He used to tell stories about the village in the '50s and '60s," Vuocolo says. Vuocolo says her husband read voraciously, and was also a keen observer of the neighborhood. She still lives in the small apartment they shared, which is packed with her late husband's books, guitars and collections of African and Native American art. But Van Ronk stayed put, taking on students between gigs to pay the bills.Īndrea Vuocolo married Van Ronk in 1988. Over time, Dylan and most other fixtures of the folk scene moved out of Greenwich Village. "Later on, when Eric Burdon and The Animals picked the song up from Bobby and recorded it, Bobby told me that he had to drop it, because everyone accused him of ripping it off from Eric Burdon," Van Ronk said. He laughed in the documentary as he remembered things eventually coming full circle. Van Ronk said he had to stop playing the song because people thought he'd stolen it from Dylan. "So I said, 'Well gee, Bob, I'd rather you didn't because I'm gonna record it myself soon.' And Bobby said, 'Uh oh.'" "He asked me if I would mind if he recorded my version of 'House of the Rising Sun,'" Van Ronk said years later in the Dylan documentary No Direction Home. In fact, Dylan borrowed one of Van Ronk's arrangements for his first album. Wald says he became a mentor to younger musicians, including Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan. He recorded a handful of well-received albums in the early 1960s. ![]() But he found more success singing blues and folk songs in the clubs that were springing up in the village. He moved to Greenwich Village as a teenager in the early '50s and tried to make it playing in old-time jazz bands. "What I really wanted - I wanted to play jazz in the worst way," he said. Despite what his legacy leaves behind, Van Ronk never thought of himself as a folk singer. The performance was recorded in October of 2001, just months before he died of colon cancer. "I have often thought back and wondered just what my reaction would have been at age 17 if someone had told me I would go through most of my life being called a folk singer," Van Ronk said during the show. That talent was front and center on 2004's And the tin pan bended and the story ended., a live recording of his last concert. Van Ronk also knew how to tell a story, a talent he displayed on stage between songs. He really knew New York, he really knew history, he really knew music," Wald says. Music Reviews Will The Real Llewyn Davis Please Stand Up? Wald helped write Van Ronk's posthumous memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, which was titled after the Greenwich Village street that was home to The Gaslight Cafe and other folk clubs in the early 1960s. "Nothing about the character is like Dave Van Ronk," Wald says. And the album cover for the fictional LP that gives the movie its title looks just like the real 1963 LP Inside Dave Van Ronk.Įlijah Wald, a writer and musician who took guitar lessons from Van Ronk, says that's where the similarities end. Like Van Ronk, the fictional Davis has dark hair and a beard, and spent some time in the merchant marine. In a scene from the Coen brothers movie, the fictional Llewyn Davis sits on stage and sings a tune that Dave Van Ronk performed and recorded. Inside Llewyn Davis is set in the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the early 1960s. Dave Van Ronk performs onstage in 1970 in New York. ![]()
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