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

We were a small enough group that the bluegrass players knew the flamenco guitarists, the flamenco people knew the blues singers, the blues singers knew the ballad scholars, and all of us knew the Irish musicians. And there
was a great deal of cross-pollination. For example, during that period I acquired a little knowledge of flamenco singing and guitar playing, I developed a decent repertoire of Child ballads, and I even learned parts from Dowland’s Airs for Four Voices . We were all hanging out together, and if you were any kind of musician, you couldn’t find enough hands to pick all the pockets that were available. So I ended up with a very broad musical base, without even thinking about it, simply because of the range of people I was associating with. And while I did not continue to play much of that material, a lot of it was adapted and incorporated into other things I did, and I am musically much the better for it. 10
    Later on, when the scene got bigger, the niches became more specialized and the different groups didn’t mix as much, which was a real pity. The musical world became segregated, and today people no longer get that broad range of influences. There is also this constant pursuit of the new, the search for the next big thing, which is very limiting. It’s like, if you want to be a painter—I don’t care if you want to be a representational realist or an op artist—you still go back and study the old masters. You look at Correggio, you check out Titian and Rembrandt. A while ago, I went to a retrospective show of Arshile Gorky, the early abstract expressionist, and it starts out with Gorky when he’s fourteen doing Cezanne, and then there’s Gorky at age sixteen doing Picasso, and so on. Eventually, you get to the later works, and there is Gorky doing, by God, Arshile Gorky. But if you begin there, you miss the opportunity to profit from the experience Gorky acquired. And it’s the same with music, whether it’s me or Dylan or a jazz trumpeter. You have to start somewhere, and the broader your base, the more options you have.
    For a while there, we were all learning from each other, and there was relatively little recorded music coming into the mix. What with the blacklist, the folk record business had slowed way down in the early 1950s, and anyway, my crowd did not have much interest in the sort of folk music that
would have been recorded at that point. That whole thing with the Weavers and the cabaret folksingers—Cynthia Gooding, Susan Reed, Richard Dyer-Bennett, Theo Bikel, Oscar Brand—we might see some of those people occasionally, and often got along with them quite well personally, but their approach to the music did not interest us at all. It was obviously related to the “art song” tradition, very genteel and refined, which to us was the antithesis of everything that true folk music should be. It always used to tickle me to see Richard Dyer-Bennett sing “John Henry” in a tuxedo, or someone get up in an evening gown and perform an Appalachian ballad. We considered all of that slick and fake. Of course, to a great extent, it was a generational thing: we thought of them as the old wave and conceived of ourselves as an opposition, as is the way of young Turks in every time and place. 11
    We were severely limited, however, because much as we might consider ourselves devotees of the true, pure folk styles, there was very little of that music available. Then a marvelous thing happened. Around 1953 Folkways Records put out a six-LP set called the Anthology of American Folk Music, culled from commercial recordings of traditional rural musicians that had been made in the South during the 1920s and ’30s. The Anthology was created by a man named Harry Smith, who was a beatnik eccentric artist, an experimental filmmaker, and a disciple of Aleister Crowley. (When he died in the 1990s, his fellow Satanists held a memorial black mass for him, complete with a virgin on the altar.) Harry had a