Free The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk Page A

music.
    That Washington Square Sunday afternoon scene was a great catalyst for my whole generation. It kept getting bigger and bigger every year, and by the late 1950s it had become a tourist attraction as well. That was kind of a drag, on one hand, but on the other it meant that we had an audience, which was good for those of us who were, in effect, learning our craft. If you were a soloist, you would just sit down—at least I always sat—and start to play, and people would gather around. You would stake out your own little bit of private turf, where you would not have to sing “Hey Lolly Lolly” with a bunch of people, and then you would keep singing for as long as you could hold an audience. Just as in the jazz world, I had an advantage because of my volume—whether or not I was any good, I could always make myself heard—so I usually had a pretty good crowd around me. Incidentally, there was no money involved in any of this. I never saw anybody pass the hat or collect a cent in Washington Square Park. Some of us could have used the extra money, but most of the singers were still living at home and did not really need it, and in any case it simply was not done.
    As with my migration to the Village, or my involvement in trad jazz, my assimilation into the Washington Square scene happened over a period of time and there was never any clear break between that and what I had been doing before. In fact, a great part of what attracted me to the folk scene was that I could hear the tie between what some of those people were doing and
the music that I was already playing. There had been a good deal of interaction between jazz and some of the older folk styles, at least during its first twenty or thirty years, which was the period that most attracted me at that time. When Bessie Smith sang something like “Backwater Blues,” was it jazz or folk music? I would hate to have to answer that question, because there simply is no clear distinction, no firm line dividing the two.
    When I heard Leadbelly, I immediately fit him into the music that was already familiar to me. Except for the fact that he sang over his own guitar rather than a band, there was not that much difference between his singing and what I was hearing on a lot of trad records. So for a while I developed a huge crush on Leadbelly, singing a bunch of his numbers and doing them as closely as I could to the way he did them. Josh White was another one. I probably started to listen to Josh when I was still living in Queens, because he was the big star at that point, and to this day when I listen to a tape of myself, I can occasionally hear some of Josh.
    Because of those links, blues was my original door into the folk world, but I was never really a blues singer, in the sense of devoting myself exclusively to that. I never stopped doing jazz material, and I also picked up all sorts of other stuff in one place and another. I still have some tapes I recorded in the mid-1950s, and they include songs like “If You Miss Me Here, You Can Find Me at the Greasy Spoon,” an old vaudeville thing that I learned off a record by Coot Grant and Kid Wilson. Now, that is material you did not hear every day, but I had a lot of stuff like that, as well as dozens of Bessie Smith tunes, and I found that with a little work I could fit all of it into the fingerpicking and country blues format. So I had a unique repertoire, and I think that gave me something of a jump start compared with the people who had gotten involved entirely through the folk scene.
    Of course, I also got a lot from the folk crowd. While I never thought of myself as a folksinger, I would harmonize along with whoever was singing, and I learned a lot of those songs just through osmosis. Later on, when I started to perform regularly, I used some of that material, too, because I would have been crazy not to. One thing I need to emphasize is that the folk scene at that point was a lot more varied than it became later on.