Free The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk

drums, and that kept out the bongo players. The Village had bongo players up the wazoo, and they would have loved to sit in, and we hated them. So that was some consolation.
    When I first made my appearance on that scene, the permit holder was Lionel Kilberg, who played a homemade “brownie bass” with the string band crowd. Lionel was already considered an old-timer, along with Roger Sprung, whom he played with in a trio called the Shanty Boys. (The third member was Mike Cohen, brother of John Cohen of New Lost City Ramblers fame.) As for the other veteran regulars, an article Barry Kornfeld
wrote for Caravan magazine gives a pretty good idea, though as I recall, a few of the names were gone by my time: Bob Claiborne, Tom Paley, Ray Boguslav, “Prof” Joe Jaffe, Stan Atlas, Rod Hill, Dick Rosmini, Erik Darling, Jean and Joe Silverstein, Ed Jancke, and on occasion, Pete Seeger. I do not remember Pete coming around, but I saw Woody Guthrie there a couple of times—I understand that it was John Cohen who brought him down. By that time, though, he was in very poor shape. He could still play a little, and we were introduced, but speech was coming very hard to him and it was impossible to communicate or strike up any kind of rapport.
    As a general thing, there would be six or seven different groups of musicians, most of them over near the arch and the fountain. The Zionists were the most visible, because they had to stake out a large enough area for the dancers, and they would be over by the Sullivan Street side of the square, singing “Hava Nagilah.” 9 Then there would be the LYL-ers, the Stalinists: someone like Jerry Silverman would be playing guitar, surrounded by all these summer camp kids of the People’s Songs persuasion, and they would be singing old union songs and things they had picked up from Sing Out! Sometimes they would have a hundred people, all singing “Hold the Fort,” and quite a lot of them knew how to sing harmony, so it actually could sound pretty good. Very few of those people stayed around for more than a year or two, though. Most of them came down because they belonged to these various youth groups, and when they dropped out of the youth groups, they dropped out of the music.
    The bluegrassers would be off in another area, led by Roger Sprung, the original citybilly. As far as I know, Roger single-handedly brought Scruggs picking to the city—not just to New York but to any city. Lionel Kilberg would be playing bass, and there would be a little group around them that gradually grew to include a lot of people who would go on to spearhead the bluegrass and old-time string band revivals.
    Then there were various people singing ballads and blues, and we would split into a number of smaller circles around whoever felt like singing. The individual singers varied over the years, but they might include me, Dick Rosmini, Barry Kornfeld, Luke Faust, Jerry Levine, Happy Traum, Paul Clayton, Gina Glaser, Roy Berkeley, Roger Abrahams
. . . The ballad singers and the blues people tended to hang around together, because there were not many of either, comparatively speaking, so we banded together for mutual support. We did not make as much noise as the other groups, and we hated them all—the Zionists, the LYL-ERS, and the bluegrassers—every last, dead one of them. Of course, we hated a lot of people in those days.
    Those were roughly the divisions, though different people might have developed slightly different taxonomies: Paul Clayton at one point decided that the whole movement could be divided into two essential tendencies, which he called bluegrass and greensleeves. He included the blues singers among the greensleevers, and if one leaves out the political singers, that was about how I saw it, as well. Which is not to say that the greensleevers did not have politics—some did, some did not—but there was a consensus among us that using folk music for political ends was distasteful and insulting to the