By Daniel Massey
Dave Van Ronk, the gravelly-voiced blues and folk singer who grew up in Richmond Hill and was a crucial early influence on Bob Dylan, died Sunday morning at NYU Medical Center.
He was 65 years old and had been undergoing treatment for colon cancer, said his manager, Mitchell Greenhill, said a prepared statement.
Van Ronk was born in Brooklyn in 1936, but moved to Richmond Hill with his mother around the time he was 11.
He once recalled in an interview that the stickball was better in Queens than Brooklyn because traffic was lighter.
Van Ronk attended a Richmond Hill Catholic school and began playing ukulele at age 12. He enrolled at Richmond Hill HS, but dropped out around 1951 after he was picked up by a truant officer in a pool hall.
“I was hauled before the principal,” he said in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site. “You never saw the principal, this was like being brought before Stalin. He called me a ‘filthy ineducable little beast.’ That’s a direct quote. You don’t forget something like that.”
At 16, Van Ronk enrolled in a continuing education program in Jamaica, but said he “didn’t take it seriously.”
He did, however, have a purposeful attitude toward music. He listened intently to traditional jazz on the radio, collected records of jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and in 1949 performed in a barbershop quartet.
“I was a musical carnivore,” Van Ronk once recalled. He learned to play guitar, at first treating it like a ukulele and playing on only four strings.
Gradually, Van Ronk made fewer and fewer appearances at his mother’s home. By the time he was 17, he had moved with some friends from Richmond Hill to an apartment on the corner of Bowery and Fourth Street in Manhattan.
Van Ronk traveled as a merchant seaman until the folksinger Odetta encouraged him to perform professionally. When his seaman’s papers were stolen from him on a train ride from Chicago to New York, Van Ronk decided it was time to try his hand as a folksinger.
Beginning in the late 1950s he toured widely, performing his arrangements of classic acoustic blues in coffeehouses and on college campuses.
Van Ronk was at the forefront of a Greenwich Village-based musical movement that drew inspiration from rural blues masters, while creating a solo performance genre popular with urban, college-educated audiences.
In 1958, he made his first recording, “Skiffle in Stereo,” and a year later his first solo album, “Dave Van Ronk Sings Earthy Blues and Ballads,” was released.
An expert finger picker, Van Ronk was considered the grandfather of the Greenwich Village folksinging scene that flourished in the 1960s.
Known to friends as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street,” his Sheridan Square apartment served as a hangout for singers such as Odetta, Tom Paxton and Peter Yarrow, and a classroom for aspiring musicians like Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Christine Lavin.
When a young Dylan arrived in the Village from Minnesota in the early 1960s, he often stayed with Van Ronk, who was influential in the early development of the aspiring singer.
A physically imposing figure —Van Ronk was also nicknamed the “Bear”— he was a gourmet cook who invited young musicians to his apartment for a meal as a sign he approved of their playing.
With a glass of wine in hand, he would spin philosophical tales. “Honesty is the cruelest game of all,” he once observed. “Because not only can you hurt someone—and hurt them to the bone—you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.”
Van Ronk, who taught guitar until he became sick, received a Grammy nomination, and in 1997 was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers.
One of his prized students, singer/songwriter Christine Lavin, presented the award to Van Ronk, along with a book of recollections e-mailed by friends and fans.
One of those who shared memories was songwriter Janis Ian. “The amount of songwriters and singers who have stood on his shoulders is monumental, and I often wonder that the weight of our presence has not crippled him completely,” she wrote.
His final album was “Sweet and Lowdown,” a collection of jazz standards including “As Time Goes By,” released in 2001.
Van Ronk is survived by his wife Andrea Cuocolo. A memorial service is pending.
Reach reporter Daniel Massey by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 156.
