Inauspicious as it may have been, that first trip to Greenwich Village was the starting point for a desultory migration across the East River and into the life of a professional musician. There is no way I can sort out an exact chronology for this hegira, but it started around 1951 and continued in stages over the course of the next few years. I never officially left home, but I would go over to Manhattan and end up crashing on somebody’s floor overnight, and then it got to be two nights, then three, until eventually I was spending most of my time in Manhattan—though every few days I would make the trek back to Queens to change my underwear and see if I could mooch some money. Gradually these visits grew less frequent, and by the time I was about seventeen, I was living in Manhattan full-time.
Originally, my plan was to make a living playing jazz, and to that purpose I added yet another instrument to my musical armory: a tenor banjo. This probably requires some explanation, since it has been a good many years since anyone switched from guitar to banjo in order to be a jazz musician.
In the 1940s the jazz world had been rocked by what came to be known as the “mouldy fig wars.” During that period, a revival of interest in early jazz coincided with the beginnings of what is now called bebop. A duel to the death was proclaimed, and critics solemnly lined up: you were either a “progressive,” hailing the innovations of the boppers, or a warrior in the defense of the traditional New Orleans style—a “mouldy fig.” In hindsight, both sides had their merits and both took their positions to ridiculous extremes. The modernists were aesthetic Darwinists, arguing that jazz had to progress and that later forms must necessarily be superior to earlier ones. The traditionalists were Platonists, insisting that early jazz was “pure” and that all subsequent developments were dilutions and degenerations. This comic donnybrook dominated jazz criticism for ten or fifteen years, with neither side capable of seeing the strengths of the other, until it finally subsided and died, probably from sheer boredom. Before that point, though, a lot of otherwise sensible people had made asses of themselves.* I remember a friend during this period telling me that he had been on his way to some big jazz festival but had discovered that Charlie Parker was playing, and was so disgusted that he turned around and drove home. This made perfect sense to me.
Being an adolescent, I was naturally an absolutist, so as soon as I became aware that this titanic tempest in a teapot was going down, I had to jump one way or the other. As a result, I turned my back on a lot of good music. When I was twelve or thirteen, Charlie Christian was my favorite guitarist, I had amassed a huge collection of the Benny Goodman sextet, and I listened to bebop and modern jazz. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I had come to regard all of that music as a sorry devolution from the pure New Orleans style. I was convinced, intellectually and ideologically, that the traditionalists had the better of it, and that led me to a lot of good music, but it also led me away from a lot of good music and toward a lot of truly terrible music. It was an ideological judgment rather than a musical one, and it was stupid. It turned me on to Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong, but also led me to support any aggregation of toothless incompetents over Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker. I gave away all my Gillespie records and acquired recordings of old New Orleans relics, many of whom had probably never been very good even in their youth and prime.
I also switched from guitar to tenor banjo, since according to the canons of those times, guitar was not a proper instrument for a traditional jazz band. (I have since seen pictures of the most canonical New Orleans jazz bands, such as Buddy Bolden’s, and they show guitars to have been at least as common as banjos back at the dawn of jazz, but I did not know that in 1953.) I did not like the banjo much—it clanged like some kind of windup toy, and I had trouble fitting my fingers on the neck—but there was a lot of pressure on me. So I switched over and quickly became one of the worst tenor banjo players on the trad scene. And to be the worst at tenor banjo, you’re really competing, because that’s a fast track. I couldn’t keep time in a bucket, I kept blowing the chord changes, and no sane jazz musician would ever have hired me, except for one thing: I had a loud voice and I didn’t mind taking vocals. A lot of people who played jazz at that point—and some even today—thought that taking vocals was infra dignitatem: a real jazz musician didn’t sing. (Just as a real jazz musician didn’t dance.) Exceptions were made for a few of the older guys, like Jack Teagarden or Louis Armstrong, but a lot of people stopped taking Mose Allison seriously as a pianist the minute he opened his mouth.
In addition, working in clubs that had no sound systems of any kind, anyone who wanted to be a singer had to be able to make do without a mike. I had a very loud voice—as some wit remarked at the time, “When Van Ronk takes a vocal, the hogs are restless for miles around”—and if the key was right, I could cut through a seven-piece band. (That was the standard trad outfit: trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piano, bass, drums, and of course a banjo. If there was a little extra money, they would sometimes add a second trumpet, because a lot of those guys liked the Yerba Buena’s two-trumpet sound.) So I took the vocals, and in return they would let me hold my banjo.
Thus, with my Vega in hand, I set out to be a professional jazzman. By that time I was already six foot two and weighed about 220 pounds. Six or seven months later, thanks to my devotion to jazz, I weighed 170. I didn’t have the sense God gave a duck. I had never starved before, and I had no idea of the great range of possibilities out there in the world—one of them being starvation. At first I was just sitting in occasionally with pick-up bands, and for a while a bunch of kids my own age also put together our own group. Since we thought we were a pretty clever bunch, we came up with a real thigh-slapper of a name: the Brute Force Jazz Band. We thought that was very witty; audiences thought it was very accurate. We played where we could, at rare intervals and to no great acclaim, and then I ended up with a relatively steady organization called the Jazz Cardinals—though I was still doing pick-up work whenever I could get it. The Cardinals were led by a Dutchman named Eric Huystedt who sounded very much like Sidney Bechet, and we had a regular gig at a place called the Amber Lantern in New Jersey. Boy, did we get screwed! I remember one time we divvied up all the money we had made that evening, and it came to forty-seven cents each.
Those were the waning days of the trad-Dixieland revival. I was “just in time to be too late,” as the song says, and the trad scene was by then dominated by a bunch of cornballs in funny hats, moonlighting insurance execs, and a smattering of dedicated musicians eking out a meager existence by gumping meals at the Automat. (Gumping is when you race the busboy to an unfinished plate of food, finish it, and repeat the procedure until you are no longer hungry or you get thrown out, whichever comes first.) It was really slim pickings. Often you would play for union scale and then have to slip the owner something back under the table. You were lucky to get two gigs in a week; more often you would get one gig in two weeks. Trying to live on that, even in the golden fifties, wasn’t easy.
Still, I learned a lot by working with those bands. We were playing all the old chestnuts, things like “At the Jazz Band Ball” and “Fidgety Feet,” and I was picking up some relatively sophisticated chord changes, which gave me an enormous leg up a few years later when I got involved in the folk scene. The joke in the early 1960s was that I was the only folksinger in New York who knew how to play a diminished chord, and while that was not quite true, it does indicate what set me apart from a lot of the other people.
Most of the jobs I played were outside New York City, especially over in Jersey. There was a country club in West Orange, a place in Fort Lee. One of the nice things was that I got to meet some of the old-timers. One time, I did a benefit concert out at Welfare Island with a pick-up group, and Eubie Blake showed up; I vividly remember him playing “Baltimore Rag.” I also sat in on sessions at clubs like the Stuyvesant Casino and Child’s Paramount; I recall one night when the line-up included Miff Mole, Jimmy McPartland, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, and Ben Webster, and there I was backing them.* I played with Joe Sullivan a couple of times, and once with Jimmy Rushing. I could never have worked officially in those places because I was not a member of the AF of M, the musicians’ union, but they managed to squeeze me in. If the union delegate came by, Rushing or whoever was the titular leader would take over and I would get offstage. Of course, my instrument was still up there and the delegate knew perfectly well what was going on, but he wouldn’t do anything about it.
There is an apprenticeship system in jazz, so even if the older musicians were not personally all that accessible or friendly, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians. That is generally true of people who are serious about music. When the first Cro-Magnon started to bang on a bone, he was probably ready to show the second Cro-Magnon how to do it. Musicians are sweet people, and if you really care about music and want to learn, they will rally to you and do what they can to help you, even if you don’t know shit from Shinola.
Of all the older musicians, the one I remember most fondly was Clarence Williams. Clarence was originally a piano player out of New Orleans, and he had come up to New York around the time of World War I. By the early 1920s he had established himself as just about the key figure in jazz in New York, and he was well qualified for the role. He was a damn good piano player, but more than that, he was a composer and songwriter, a publisher, and what they called a “record contractor.” In those days, when a record company wanted to record some tunes, it would get hold of someone like Clarence and he would be given a budget to cut a certain number of sides. The rest was up to him: he would pick the tunes or write them himself, arrange them, pick the musicians, choose the recording studio, pay all the expenses, and whatever money was left over was his pay. Clarence arranged a lot of sessions for other people, and also plenty for himself under various names, the most famous of which was Clarence Williams and His Blue Five, a shifting group that at times included people like Louis Armstrong.
Where Clarence really earned his place in history, though, was when the blues boom took off. Around 1920, there was a fluke hit, a thing called “Crazy Blues,” recorded by a black singer named Mamie Smith. It came out of left field and sold close to a million copies, and all the commercial record companies immediately went into feeding-frenzy mode. One of them, Okeh records, called Clarence and said, “We want one of those.” So Clarence went down south on a talent hunt and came back to New York with this hot young blues singer, and her name was Bessie Smith. Following the old rule of “finders, keepers,” Clarence became the contractor for Bessie’s early records. That meant that he not only played piano on a lot of them but got to write—and more importantly, publish—the songs, which was where the money was.
When I knew Clarence, he was retired and had a little place on 125th Street called the Harlem Thrift Shop. It was his office and hangout—as far as I could see, he never actually sold anything out of there. All that he had in that shop was his own self and two pianos. It was a tiny place, but he squeezed the second piano in there because what he was running was a kind of clearinghouse for piano players. If some out-of-town pianist was passing through New York, he would stop by to say hello to Clarence, and of course a lot of piano players lived in the city as well. So there I was, at sixteen and seventeen years old, sitting in a corner and listening to Clarence Williams play piano duets with James P. Johnson or Willie “The Lion” Smith or Joe Sullivan, people like that. I would sit in a corner, with my eyes like saucers. I mean, I was a schmucky little kid in some ways, but I was not so dumb that I didn’t know how lucky I was.
Clarence liked to play a game that seems to be a favorite with most composers. As far as I can figure out, its name must be “And then I wrote . . .” because it always starts with the composer playing an arpeggio, smiling at whoever is listening, and saying, “And then I wrote . . .” and going into a tune. A lot of them were pretty familiar tunes, but some were real rarities, and there were a couple that I kept in my repertoire from then on. I also heard a lot of stories, gossip, and musician talk. At the time, I found some of it pretty shocking, because these musicians were the creators and inventors of the music I loved, and it turned out that quite often they were cantankerous old curmudgeons who hated each other’s guts. For example, if you got Clarence Williams onto the subject of Jelly Roll Morton, his reaction would be something like “That plagiarist!? That thief!?” He would become apoplectic. So you learned not to mention Jelly Roll Morton around Clarence Williams. I am told that Duke Ellington felt the same way about Morton. I do not know what Morton had to say about Clarence—to my eternal regret, Morton died before I could get my hands on him—but I do know what he had to say about W. C. Handy, the man who wrote “St. Louis Blues,” “Memphis Blues,” and a bunch of other hits. What he said was “Well, yes, there was a lot of unprotected material around in those days . . .”
Back then, I found this pretty disenchanting. I thought, “How could this band of brothers, these great pioneers, talk of one another so irreverently?” It was terrible. Now, looking back, I find it pretty damn funny. I suppose that as I get older, I get more curmudgeonly myself, and I can identify with that kind of thing.
All in all, I was learning more than I could possibly assimilate—it took me years to even begin to get a handle on everything I was seeing and hearing. Admittedly, my failures in this respect may to some extent be traceable to other aspects of the jazz life: Eddie Condon once remarked that when you are a musician, a dozen people might offer to buy you a drink in the course of an evening but nobody ever walks up and says, “Hey, let me stand you to a ham sandwich.” Between starvation and inebriation, it’s a miracle that any of us survived, much less actually learned anything.
Of course, as a dedicated apprentice hipster, my experiences in this field were not limited to alcohol. My acquaintance with the demon weed dates to around 1954, a halcyon year for vipers.* I was working at yet another country club, somewhere on the prairies of New Jersey, with yet another pick-up trad jazz band. As we were shuffling off the stage to take our first break, the bass player, a little guy named Arnie, whispered conspiratorially, “Hey kid, you wanna try a new kind of cigarette?”
I was no square; I had read Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues, and knew all about marijuana. To let him know how hip I was, I said, “That’s cool, Daddy”—I’m sure he was impressed—and we betook ourselves to the parking lot, where he produced a little, ratty-looking, tapered cylinder of grayish paper, stuffed, he said, with “dyno doojie.”
“Take a deep drag, and hold it in your lungs as long as you can,” he said. It was like inhaling a forest fire, but I did as I was told. “As long as I could” turned out to be about three-tenths of a second. I immediately hacked the smoke back up with a series of coughs that must have rattled every window in Monmouth County. Arnie was delighted. He laughed so hard, he almost fell down—so much for Big Dave the hipster.
After a few more tokes, I sort of got the hang of it, but where was the euphoria? Except for a slightly sore throat, I felt nothing. We smoked the joint down to a tiny butt, burning our lips in the process. The butt, he explained, was called a “roach” and could be disposed of in several ways. His preferred method was to knead some tobacco out of the end of a Chesterfield, push the roach into the vacated space, and twist the loose paper shut. “Shooting the bullet,” he called it. So we finished the whole joint, and I still didn’t feel a damn thing. I was baffled. Was the dope no good? Was Arnie putting me on? Had Mezz Mezzrow lied?
We could hear the horns warming up, so we hurried back inside, and I took my place on the stand, just in front of the bass and drums. I picked up my banjo. It looked silly, so I giggled. The drummer called the first tune, “Royal Garden Blues” in B flat, counted it down, and we were off and running. My hands were fascinating: they just kept moving without any conscious direction, making all kinds of wonderful patterns. Then the tune was over, and everybody stopped. But not me, I was really into it. Arnie kicked me and I chugged slowly to a stop. Wow, those fingers! The next piece featured me on the vocal.
Bob, the leader, called “Frankie and Johnny,” an overdone ballad with about two hundred verses. This had never been one of my favorites, and by the time Frankie got around to shooting Johnny I was totally bored and wishing that I was singing “Cake Walking Babies from Home” instead. So I promptly switched songs, changing keys as I went along. Some of the guys tried to follow me, while the rest doggedly plodded on with “Frankie.” The result was the musical equivalent of a three-way midair collision. I was ecstatic, still grinning from ear to ear as I was led from the stand. I had never had so much fun onstage in my life, but those killjoys made me sit out the rest of the set.
The audience, of course, never noticed a thing.
As I was rapidly discovering, it is hard work surviving without a steady job. I could usually come up with a floor or a couch to crash on, but food was always a problem. We would have boosting expeditions—I never actually did this myself, but I was certainly party to the proceeds—where a group would go into a supermarket and secrete some small, high-value items such as caviar and potted shrimp about their persons. Then we would go out and shop these things off to our more affluent friends for bags of rice and bulk items that were too big to shoplift.
We would head out in the early morning on what we used to call the “dawn patrol.” We would hit people’s stoops at about four-thirty or five and get milk, eggs, sometimes even bread, and one copy each of the New York Times. A bunch of us were crashing more or less regularly in a loft on the Bowery, so we got a lot of tips from the local winos. There was a birdseed factory right down the block, and if you got there for shape-up, those fortunate enough to be chosen would have the opportunity of unloading fifty-pound sacks of birdseed. I did that sometimes, and as it happened, the birdseed was marijuana, and in those days they didn’t irradiate the stuff, so among other things we had a little farm going by the stove. Very nice, until one day the cat got at it. Somehow, though, heaving around fifty-pound sacks of marijuana took a lot of the romance out of dope for me.
I did all kinds of things. I was a bank messenger for a while—an insane business that is perfectly captured in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn—and I did a little factory work. (I used to say that I had an assembly-line job dotting the eyes on Mickey Mouse dolls, which is not quite true, but close enough.) I knew a guy who had a catering service, and sometimes he would hire me when he had a big party, which paid a few bucks and also had some side benefits: there was often food left over, and once the customers got a bit tipsy, we would ferret away a bottle of champagne for every couple we served.
If worst came to worst, there were always day jobs busing tables in an Automat. However, by the mid-1950s I was getting involved with radical politics, and being a lefty could be an occupational hazard in even the most minor occupations. My friend Lenny was working a restaurant job, and the FBI came around and started asking his boss questions about a suspicious, dangerous character who was waiting tables, and of course the guy fired him.
There was also the problem of keeping clean. We had to do things like mooch showers. Haircuts were to be had only at the barber college down on the Bowery—either that or we’d cut each other’s hair. We couldn’t afford to get our clothes cleaned. We would gradually get grungier and grungier, and eventually you would be so grungy that they wouldn’t even hire you to bus tables.
There were compensations, though. Our loft was at 15 Cooper Square, which was right across the street from the original Five Spot, and in those days Thelonious Monk was playing there as sort of a steady thing. We would go over and sit at the bar in the afternoon, and Monk would be there with his musicians, rehearsing and working out new tunes. Beer was ten or fifteen cents in the afternoon, and you could sit and listen to Monk and Coltrane and that band. As icing on the cake, off to the side there was an old-time telephone booth with accordion doors, and every now and again the band would take a break and somebody would go in there and roll a joint. Around five or six o’clock, when the prices changed, the band went home to get ready for the evening’s show, and we would go into the telephone booth, and in the cracks of the door would be roaches. Those guys did not smoke lemonade; they had really good dope, so we would collect all these roaches and make new joints out of them, and get bombed out of our birds, basically on the house.
There was actually a lot of good music around that you could hear for free. I remember hearing Alexander Schneider conducting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in Washington Square Park. And then, of course, there were the folksingers. Thanks to my Virgil, Rochelle, I had been introduced to the Sunday afternoon hootenannies in Washington Square at the outset of my descent into the Village. However, any interest I might have had in folk music had gone by the boards as soon as I cast my lot with the jazz fraternity, because if there was one thing that all jazz musicians could agree on, it was that folk music was irredeemably square. We thought of it as “hillbilly shit,” a bunch of guys who didn’t even know how to play their instruments and just got by with “cowboy chords.” The little I heard while passing through the Square on Sundays confirmed my newfound snobbishness. It was essentially summer camp music, songs these kids had learned at progressive camps that I came to think of generically as Camp Gulag on the Hudson. The sight and sound of all those happily howling petit bourgeois Stalinists offended my assiduously nurtured self-image as a hipster, not to mention my political sensibilities, which had become vehemently IWW-anarchist. They were childish, and nothing bothers a serious-minded eighteen-year-old as much as childishness. So for a couple of years I avoided the place like the plague, for fear of contamination. If I had to pass anywhere in the vicinity, I would walk through as quickly as possible, obviating any possibility that I might get sucked in by something like “Blue Tail Fly” and shortly find myself doing the hora around the fountain and singing “Hey Lolly, Lolly Lo.”
Eventually, though, I came to realize that there were some very good musicians operating on the fringes of the radical Rotarian sing-alongs. People like Tom Paley, Dick Rosmini, and Fred Gerlach were playing music cognate with early jazz, and doing it with a subtlety and directness that blew me away. I had heard that kind of playing before, but only on old 78s that I had picked up by chance while searching for jazz discs. At that time you couldn’t just go out and buy an LP reissue of people like Mississippi John Hurt or Robert Johnson. In fact, the LP format had been introduced only a few years earlier. (I still have RL 101, the very first Riverside ten-inch record, a thing called Louis Armstrong Plays the Blues. At first I was very annoyed to find that instead of Louis solo, it was him backing blues singers like Chippie Hill and Ma Rainey. Then I started to listen and liked it very much.) If I wanted to find a lot of the older jazz stuff, I had to go out and look for used 78s. There was a place on 47th Street, the Jazz Record Center, which we called “Engine Joe’s,” and it was a treasure trove of jazz and jazz-related music of all sorts; it had writing on the stairs as you went up, saying, “Everything from Bunk to Monk,” which the mouldy figs misquoted as “from Bunk to junk.” There would be these stacks of records that you could look through, and some cost as much as ten bucks, but there were also some for twenty-five cents. They would have Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith, and also all kinds of people that I had never heard of before, like Bumble Bee Slim and Furry Lewis. So what the hell, for two bits you could afford to indulge your curiosity.
I was never really a collector, because I was sleeping on floors and that sort of thing, and for record collecting you need a stable place to live. Still, I picked up a few 78s, and a lot of people I knew were accumulating collections—for a while there, you did not factor into the scene at all unless you could discuss cactus needles intelligently—so I had access to a fair amount of material. Also, the reissue series were beginning, and I shortly picked up a ten-inch record called Listen to Our Story, which Alan Lomax had put together for Decca. It was a collection of ballads that had originally been issued on 78s, most of them by white hillbilly singers, but it included “Stackolee” by Furry Lewis and a thing called “True Religion” by Reverend Edward Clayborn, both with fingerpicked guitar.
When I heard “Stackolee,” I assumed it was two guitars, one playing the bass line and the other playing the melody. I had no idea that there was such a thing as fingerpicking. My idea of playing guitar was either chopping fours—playing rhythm chords—or something like what Charlie Christian did. Then, sometime around 1954 or 1955, I happened to be walking across Washington Square Park of a Sunday afternoon, and I noticed this guy playing an old New York Martin, a very small, very sweet guitar, and he was doing something that sounded an awful lot like “Stackolee.” It immediately grabbed my attention, because he was doing the whole thing by himself: his thumb was picking out the bass notes while he was playing the melody with his fingers. I had never seen anything like that, so I stood there and listened, and when he stopped playing, I immediately buttonholed him and asked him to show me what he was doing. That was Tom Paley, who later became a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers. He was very nice, and graciously answered all my dumb questions, slowed the whole thing down, and gave me the general gist of how it worked.*
The advantages of fingerpicking were immediately obvious to me, because what I really wanted to do was sing and that style of playing was ideal for accompanying yourself. I rushed home to my guitar and went to work. I have never applied myself to any project with such intensity before or since. Paley had provided the key, but mastering the technique took time. I did not take any lessons—there was nobody around then, as far as I knew, who was giving any—but Sunday after Sunday I hit Washington Square, watching other fingerstyle guitar players, meeting them, and picking their brains. A few of them lived in the Village, but most were still living with their parents in the burbs. I made friends like Barry Kornfeld and Dick Rosmini, who were already picking like sonofabitches. Gradually, I improved—we all did, actually. When one of us figured something out, the knowledge would be shared, and our general level of skill rose. It was a combined process of experimentation and theft: you would come up with an idea, and the next thing you knew, all your friends would be playing it, but that was fine because when they came up with an idea, you would be playing it. As Machiavelli used to say, “Things proceed in a circle, and thus the empire is maintained.”
Thus began my shift from jazz to folk music, a change that defied the general rule that things evolve from the simple to the more complex. In this case I made a move that was technically retrogressive, but it was about the only thing I could do to survive. I was a high school dropout, so there was no chance that I was going to become a professor of comparative philology or a nuclear physicist who played the guitar on the side. And much as I loved traditional jazz, I was sick to death of performing the music of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton for drunken undergraduates who wanted us to put on funny hats and sing “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” Even if I had been able to stomach it, that scene was all but dead, and there was no GI bill for veterans of the mouldy fig wars. It was clear that my career plans were due for an agonizing reappraisal, and unless I wanted to get out of music entirely, folk music was the only way I could jump. So I cast off my carefully cultivated jazz snobbery and set out to reinvent myself as a fingerpicking guitarist and singer. Like the man said, “Sometimes you have to forget your principles and do what’s right.”
*Albeit sometimes wittily. Eddie Condon on bebop: “In my day we didn’t flat our fifths, we drank ’em.” Or Miles Davis on hearing a Bunk Johnson record: “They sound like a prison band, and they should be kept there until they stop playing like that.”
*Of course, Hawkins was a bit modern for my taste at that point—my idea of a really good saxophone player was one of the guys who played with King Oliver—but I was willing to put up with Coleman Hawkins. As for what he thought of me, all I can say is, he was always very polite . . .
*The term “viper” for marijuana smoker, which has sadly fallen into disuse, was derived from the sound made while inhaling.
*I ran into Tom at the Vancouver Folk Festival about forty years later, and went out of my way to thank him for that afternoon, but he did not remember a bit of it. Some people don’t have any sense of history.