One of Dave Van Ronk’s loveliest compositions, this recalls his longtime lady, Joanne Grace, and also takes me back to my brief connection with the Speak Easy club on MacDougal Street. Joanne was a smart, dark, funny, and encouraging presence throughout my early years with Dave. The mid-to-late 1970s was a tough time for him, but there were also a lot of good moments and she stood the gaff and always welcomed me into their place on Sheridan Square, hung in as long as she could, and never complained when we stayed up drinking and arguing for long hours after she had wandered off to sleep.
I don’t remember the exact chronology, but assume Dave wrote this either during or immediately after the break-up, which I recall as happening over a few years. Then she was gone, and I’ve had no news of her since. There were rumors that she turned up at Dave’s memorial, but I didn’t see her, and I’ve asked various people and searched the internet with no success. Part of the fault may be mine: when I wrote my memoir of Dave in The Mayor of MacDougal Street, she was in the first several drafts, but somehow in the editing process those parts got cut–his part of the book ended before her arrival, and my part was where she fitted, and then she got left out of my telling as well. I wish I could do that over, because Joanne was a big part of my time with Dave, and of his life.
I was back and forth through New York during those years, and in the early 1980s turned up pretty regularly because a new club had opened and Dave thought I should be part of it. It was called the Speak Easy, and is best remembered for its connection with a regular LP/newsletter called Fast Folk, which documented the performers who performed there. I came in for the weekly open mike a few times over the course of several months, did a “new faces” showcase, and generally hung out at the bar with Dave, who was its eminence grise–or one of them, at any rate. Another was Cynthia Gooding, a regal presence who was also a regular at the bar (her daughter Leyla was the bartender), joking with Dave and critiquing the breath control of the young singers onstage.
It was a good time, and I met a lot of interesting people there: The one time I met Shel Silverstein, he and Dave spent a couple of hours at the bar planning a duet album — Shel wanted to record it in Sweden, and the only song they agreed on was a duet of “My Dolly Playmate.” Erik Frandsen tended to drop around, since he lived across the street, and David Massengill, Frank Christian, Constance Taylor… a bunch of talented people, and a bunch who weren’t so talented, some of them running things and being obnoxious to newcomers and outsiders…
My favorite denizens included a sax player named Chuck Hancock, who joined me for a couple of open mike performances, and Hollywood Dick Doll, who performed wonderfully odd songs with back-up by a lissome blonde who went by the name of Doll Baby. (Chuck still plays with an astonishing range of bands around New York, Dick has become a legendary Seattle busker known as PK Dwyer, and Doll Baby is now a writer, Rebecca Chace.) I had some fun nights there, and then I went out touring and when I got back things had changed, or I had, and that was that. Another time and place…