Dave Van Ronk was not primarily a songwriter, but he turned outsome gems and oddities over the years. This was his first attempt to compose a multi-section rag, and his paean to the room that was his professional home for much of the 1960s: the Gaslight Cafe on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.

The lyric contains some anachronisms: John Mitchell, who originally opened the Gaslight in 1958 to host poetry readings, sold it in 1961, so by the time Patrick Sky and Phil Ochs were on the scene it was no longer “Mitchell’s cafe.” But Dave was its reigning star for much of its heyday, doing feature nights and hosting a regular Tuesday evening hootenanny (what we’d now call an open mike), and if some facts are jumbled, the song conveys his wry affection for a unique time and the place he described as “my office and second home.”

Dave’s years at the Gaslight are described at length in The Mayor of MacDougal Street — an honorary title he was given during that time by the bartender at the Kettle of Fish. That was the bar upstairs from Mitchell’s “hole in the ground,” where Dave tended to spend the time he wasn’t onstage, since the Gaslight served only coffee (and, as Dave recalled, dreadful coffee at that).

The regular denizens of the Gaslight included Tom Paxton, whom Dave (and no one else) called “Pogo,” (I’ve previously posted Paxton’s musical vignette of the Gaslight scene, “The Name of the Game Is Stud“), and a motley array of poets, comedians, folksingers, flamenco guitarists, and blues singers. It was a place where you could see a double bill of Skip James and Doc Watson one night, Len Chandler and a Middle Eastern group the next, and then Mississippi John Hurt with Dave and Paxton opening… and I was three years old and two hundred miles away. If anyone invents a time machine, book me passage.

(Incidentally, the fish shirt I’m wearing in the video is a tribute to Dave’s sartorial tastes — he would have described it as “horrible,” meant as a compliment.)

Dave Van Ronk was hailed as the pioneering arranger of “classic” ragtime for fingerstyle guitar more or less by default. In the early 1960s he did an arrangement of “St. Louis Tickle” that was the first recording of a multi-part piano or orchestral ragtime composition on fingerstyle guitar — but he tended to argue that other people had probably played something similar in the ragtime era, and simply failed to be captured on disc or cylinder, like most music of that time.

Be that as it may, he was hailed as a pioneer, and when ragtime became news thanks to The Sting, the Joshua Rifkin recordings of Scott Joplin piano rags, the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble, and suchlike, Dave took up the challenge and began arranging more classic rags. Among them, not surprisingly, was Scott Joplin’s masterpiece, “The Maple Leaf Rag,” which Dave recorded on his Sunday Street LP. However, when I interviewed him about this he said he never really saw himself as a ragtime instrumentalist:

“When I played ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ there are probably a hundred fifty guitarists around the world who could tear me a new asshole on ‘Maple Leaf Rag,’ playing pretty much the same arrangement as I did…. But I never did that so I could do that. That was a research project. And what I learned from learning how to do that has been applied hundreds and hundreds of times to accompaniments for songs. Which is what I do do.”

He also explained that Reverend Gary Davis was the source for his arrangement: “I would have tried to play ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ in C, but I saw Gary fooling around with it and he did it in A. It was like a light bulb going on: ‘Right, that’s it!’ The rest of it came kind of easy, but only because Gary had shown me the way.”

All of which being said, what is striking about Dave’s arrangement is how simply and comfortably it falls on the guitar. Although he plays all four sections of Joplin’s rag and Davis only attempted the first section, Dave’s version is much easier to play. And although other guitarists have come closer to an exact transcription of the piano chart, none (to my knowledge) has come up with an arrangement that feels like something a guitarist might have generated naturally on the instrument. Dave’s gift was that although he loved piano music, when he arranged for guitar he thought like a folk-blues guitar player who liked ragtime, and his ragtime arrangements are completely accessible to anyone with decent fingerstyle blues guitar skills. Which, I suppose, is just a way of saying I can play the damn thing without tying my fingers in knots, and am forever grateful.

Judging by surviving evidence, “Bout a Spoonful” was a very popular song throughout the black South in the early twentieth century. In Sweet Man, a racial protest novel from 1930, Gilmore Millen named it along with “Pallet on the Floor,” “Stavin’ Chain,” and “The Dozens” as “forerunners of the blues, at least in honk-a-tonk popularity, those old songs crammed with Anglo-Saxon physiological monosyllables and lascivious purpose.”

The original honky tonk, juke joint, and barrelhouse versions of these songs were not going to be recorded by commercial record producers in the early 20th century and tended not to be collected even by the most assiduous folklorists. Among the few lyrics that survive, we have one uncensored version of “Pallet on the Floor” from Jelly Roll Morton, an uncensored “Dirty Dozens” from Speckled Red, and an uncensored “Stavin’ Chain” from Mance Lipscomb, but as far as I know, no one has ever found a version of “Bout a Spoonful” that includes any of those “Anglo-Saxon physiological monosyllables” – a much more colorful and descriptive phrase than “four-letter words.”

Fortunately, the underlying “lascivious purpose” survived expurgation in versions by Lipscomb and Rev. Gary Davis, which also provide eloquent testimony to how widespread the song must have been, since Davis was from the Carolinas and Lipscomb was in Texas, but they not only shared some lyrics but played variations of the same guitar accompaniment.

I first heard this song from Dave Van Ronk, and play his guitar part, which he adapted from Davis’s. It was the first guitar arrangement of his that I worked out from the record, during the year I was studying with him, which meant that when I got it smooth I was able to play it for him… and he pointed out that I was making it harder by playing the thumb-around-the-neck bass notes for the opening D chord, while he just played open strings. He added, “It sounds nice that way. Keep it.” So I have.

Dave only sang four verses, and omitted the key word from the tag line, writing: “Not everybody knows what a spoonful means. But they know what a pause means.” John Hurt took a similar approach in his “Coffee Blues,” and I’ve stuck with it here. The rest of the lyric is a mix of Dave’s verses, a couple from Lipscomb, a couple from elsewhere, and a couple I made up or adapted over the years.

One of Dave Van Ronk’s great flagwavers — he generally called it “Gambler’s Blues” — this was my father’s favorite out of his repertoire. They were friends from the moment I had Dave over to my folks’ place and my father came out of the kitchen to ask if he liked Russian red cabbage — he did, and then they got to trading stories about their youths in Brooklyn, and talking about African and Pre-Columbian art, and the relationship developed from there. Each took great pride and pleasure in knowing the other, and when my dad died in 1996, I asked Dave to sing this at his memorial service, and also to say a few words.

Dave talked a little about their shared love of art, then got around to his initial diffidence at knowing a world-class biologist, and told how, after a year or so, he finally got up the courage to ask my dad what he’d done to earn a particular prize. He said my father looked at him very solemnly and said, “Dave, they gave me that prize for fitting lobsters with contact lenses.” Then he sang “St. James Infirmary,” in all its grand, shouting majesty. Those guys were made for each other.

As for the song and Dave’s relationship to it, I summed that up as well as I could in the notes to his final album:

Dave would sometimes tell of singing this song while sitting in with a jazz group at the Stuyvesant Casino in the early 1950s, and having Jimmy Rushing, the legendary vocalist of the Count Basie Orchestra, add a couple of verses from a seat at the bar. On his old repertoire cards, he gave his source as “Josh White/‘Unfortunate Rake’ cycle.” White’s version was the standard template for folksingers of Dave’s generation, and The Unfortunate Rake was an album compiled for Folkways by the folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein, who produced Dave’s first two solo albums. Goldstein assembled the LP as a teaching aid, showing the evolution of this ballad from a nineteenth century English broadside about a young man dying of syphilis, through a change of gender and continent into “The Bad Girl’s Lament,” a journey west to become “The Streets of Laredo,” and various other permutations, including Dave’s recording of this African-American variant. Goldstein wrote that the original St. James Hospital was “a religious foundation for the redemption of ‘fourteen sisters, maidens, that were leperous, living chastely and honestly in divine service.’” Not Dave’s kind of joint, but fortunately the folk process provided him with more congenial surroundings.

Dave’s early recordings of this song did not include the guitar break, which he told me he added in the early 1960s just to piss off Danny Kalb. Kalb, who became the lead guitarist in Dave’s Ragtime Jug Stompers and something of a rock star with the Blues Project, took guitar lessons from Dave and annoyed the hell out of him by learning all the arrangements instantly and playing them more cleanly than Dave could. In revenge, Dave said, he gave Kalb one last lesson, at the end of which, as Kalb was walking out the door, he played him this guitar break, then threw him out without showing him how it was done.

I don’t believe that story, but I enjoy it. Likewise the song, which I play more or less the way Dave taught it to me, though I make no attempt to emulate his singing.

One of the first records I bought during that year in New York was a Blind Boy Fuller album on the Blues Classics label. I had vaguely known Fuller’s name, but that record bowled me over — there was a verve and power to his singing and guitar work that was much more exciting to me than the smoother, lighter style of Blind Blake. I suppose part of what attracted me was that I already loved Gary Davis’s playing, and Fuller was somewhat similar, but singing about rattlesnakes, rambling, and girls rather than praising God. It didn’t hurt that a lot of the tracks had Sonny Terry’s harmonica, a favorite back to my Woody Guthrie days, and I even enjoyed the washboard, which pushed a few of the cuts up a notch into obvious dance music.

I couldn’t play like Fuller, but somehow his “Bus Rider Blues” inspired me to come up with my own arrangement, not exactly in his style but inspired by his playing. It was one of the first “arrangements” I ever put together, undoubtedly inspired by the care with which Dave Van Ronk tried to give his songs unique flavors by using distinctive arrangements for each. My tendency was just to play a blues in E as a generic blues in E and a ragtime song in C as a generic ragtime song in C — which, frankly, is what a lot of the original blues artists tended to do as well, at least judging by their recordings. But Dave thought like an arranger working for a singer: his method was to work out a “chart” — his term of preference, though he did it in his head, not on paper — practice it until he could play it comfortably and consistently, then think about how to sing over and around it.

When I listened to the older guys with that in mind, a lot of them used the same approach: some would just play guitar around their vocals, but a lot of them worked out basic arrangements that they played pretty much identically from verse to verse, and often used as a break between verses as well. I don’t know why “Bus Rider Blues” became my maiden effort in that direction, nor why it turned out the way it did — I was seventeen, and moving very fast, and that just happened to be what I did one week, and then I moved on to whatever Dave was teaching me next, or to something from another record.

Many years later I got to be friends with Chris Strachwitz, who had the Arhoolie record label and ran Blues Classics as his reissue subsidiary. His model was Moe Asch, who had the Folkways label, but reissued old 78 recordings on a separate label, RBF — the reason being that neither of them wanted to buy the rights to the records they were reissuing and if they got sued they didn’t want their main labels involved. Chris had actually started Blues Classics in 1964 as a sort of Robin Hood operation to channel money to Memphis Minnie: he had visited her in Memphis, and she was in bad shape from a stroke and in dire poverty, and Columbia wasn’t going to pay her any royalties, ever, so he released an album of her old recordings and paid the royalties directly to her, ignoring any claims Columbia might put forward. (He also had a note on the back of the album suggesting fans send further contributions and giving her mailing address.)

The end of that story is that eventually, after the Blind Boy Fuller LP had appeared, Columbia sent Chris a severe “cease and desist” letter. He figured he’d probably have to either pay up or withdraw the albums, but he went to his lawyer for advice, and the lawyer said, “Let’s send them a letter demanding proof that they own the recordings.” Chris had taken for granted that they owned the recordings, since they owned the label that had issued the original records… but he sent the letter and that was the last he heard from Columbia, and we all got to hear Blind Boy Fuller and Memphis Minnie.

I spent 1976-7 in New York studying with Dave Van Ronk and listening to Yazoo pre-war blues reissues,  but only got up the nerve to attempt a handful of the pieces I heard on the old records. Of the few I managed to work out, my favorite was “Ragtime Millionaire,” recorded in 1928  by William (Bill) Moore, a barber who was born in Georgia but apparently lived most of his life in coastal Virginia. It was included on the Guitar Wizards anthology, from which I also eventually picked up a couple of Carl Martin‘s songs and some of my favorite Blind Blake numbers — but that first year, Moore’s song was the one that caught my attention, in part because of the jaunty lyrics, but also because it had a catchy guitar riff in the chorus that was one of the first guitar licks I managed to pick up off a record without help from tablature.

I don’t think anyone knows where Moore learned to play guitar, but I later became fascinated with his rhythmic quirks — he mostly stayed in basic ragtime rhythm, but every once in a while he’d throw in a sort of Latin or Caribbean accent on the bass strings, which caught my attention as I got deeper into African guitar styles. (For example: “Masanga,” “Iko Iko,” and Moore’s “One Way Gal.”)

The song itself was Moore’s reworking of a ragtime hit from 1900 by one of the most popular African American songwriters of that period, Irving Jones. As Paul Oliver noted in Songsters and Saints — a foundational book on the broad variety of African American singing often subsumed under the catch-all term “blues” — Jones’s compositions seem to have been particularly popular with early guitarists, or at least the ones whose work was preserved on record. Gus Cannon recorded an earlier Jones hit with the same theme, “My Money Never Gives Out,” and it’s easy to see how both songs would have appealed to a street singer trying to catch some passersby with a fun lyric that included a subliminal suggestion to reach in their pockets and be generous.

I couldn’t understand all of Moore’s lyrics, so I changed the words around some, but basically do it like he did it, and for a while this was my big showpiece, aside from a bunch of Van Ronk songs. The fact that it was my one big non-Ronk number incidentally led to its being what I played on my radio debut — Dave was doing a six-show weekend at Passim Coffeehouse in Cambridge and WERS wanted him to do a morning interview, and he hated to sing in the morning, so he brought me along as a (poor) substitute. I obviously wasn’t going to do one of his songs in a situation where everyone listening would just wish he was doing it, so I played “Ragtime Millionaire.”

To finish that story, when we got to the club that evening, Dave asked Bob Donlin, the owner and booker, if he’d listened and he said he had, and Dave said, “So what’d you think?” and Bob said, “He was OK,” in a voice that clearly conveyed his lack of interest in having me play there anytime soon… And to finish that story, he relented a couple of years later and gave me the chance to open for Norman Blake, and then for Tony Bird and some other people, and a lot of people considered him grumpy, but I liked him and miss him.

By sheer coincidence, the nine months I spent in New York taking lessons from Dave Van Ronk coincided with a unique opportunity to build up my blues library. I assume a collector had died, because a record store called Dayton’s, on Broadway just across 12th Street from the Strand bookstore, had mint copies of virtually every early blues reissue LP that had been issued from the late 1950s through the mid 1970s — from Folkways to Biograph, Blues Classics, Herwin,  and all the early Yazoos, back to when that label was still called Belzona.

This presented me with a dilemma: my folks were giving me $25 a week for all expenses beyond my room and board at NYU, and Dave charged $15 for his lessons, which left me with $10 to spend on records. Dayton’s was charging $3 per LP, and had at least a couple of hundred I wanted, and every week I lived in fear that some better-heeled blues fan would sweep in and clean them out. So each week I would spend hours in Dayton’s, reading liner notes and trying to figure out which records I simply had to get, balanced against which ones seemed most likely to disappear if I left them till next week… like, I wanted the Belzona St. Louis Town compilation, but it seemed more likely to last a couple more weeks than the Yazoo Young Big Bill Broonzy…

The miracle was that, for nine months, no one came in and made a major buy. I’m sure a few records slipped from my grasp, but I don’t recall them, and week after week I went through agony and chose three albums, brought them back to my dorm room, and played them over and over again, driving my roommate out to the library. I wasn’t yet good enough to be able to figure out much of what I was hearing, but at least I got the sounds in my ears, and began to develop a sense of how various people sounded and who was imitating whom, and whom I liked more or less.

At that point, the artists that most caught my attention were what are now often called Piedmont players, though Van Ronk tended to call them Eastern Seaboard players, and one of my favorites then and ever since was Carl Martin. I think I first heard him on the Yazoo Guitar Wizards compilation, and then on East Coast Blues, but it could have been the other way round — in any case, I loved his singing and his guitar style, and eventually learned four of the five songs he did on those albums (I’ve posted his version of “Old Time Blues“)… and then, twenty years later, ended up playing guitar for several years with his old musical partner, Howard Armstrong. Howard was a magnificent polymath, a painter, linguist, raconteur, and multi-instrumentalist, who specialized in mandolin and fiddle, but would sometimes pick up a guitar and play roughly this version of “Crow Jane.” I’d already learned it off Martin’s record, but it was Howard who got me to move up the A-chord bass riff to the fifth fret, though I’m not sure he played it quite this way.

One of the early songs Dave Van Ronk taught me, this was largely composed by Len Chandler, one of the most musically sophisticated writers on the Village folk scene. Chandler had been a classical oboe player in Akron, Ohio, and Dave recalled Variety referring to him as “musician turned folksinger.” As Chandler recalls it, Dave was the first person to bring him down to Washington Square and introduce him around, and he shortly became the house musician at the Gaslight Cafe, when it was still the Gaslight Poetry Cafe — there is an incredibly rare LP released on the very short-lived Gaslight label called The Beat Generation, which has him along with the two house poet/comedian/MCs, John Brent and Hugh Romney (who later became the irrepressible hippie clown Wavy Gravy).

Both Dave and Chandler remember hearing the traditional version of “Green, Green Rocky Road” from the poet Bob Kaufman, who had learned it as a child in New Orleans. It was a popular African American children’s game song throughout the South, and there’s a nice version recorded by Harold Courlander in Alabama that was issued by Folkways in the early 1950s. In Dave’s recollection, Kaufman sang it for him and Chandler backstage at the Commons, the coffeehouse where Dave was doing most of his playing in the late 1950s, but Chandler recalls learning it from Kaufman over dinner in Chandler’s apartment.

In any case, Chandler came up with a new melody and wrote the verses, Dave learned it from him, and it became one of the most enduring and requested songs in Dave’s repertoire, as well as one of his fundamental guitar arrangements in dropped D tuning. I was so used to hearing Dave do this song that I never noticed how odd the timing is on the chorus, until I was given the job of playing guitar for an all-star chorus of his friends and peers as part of a memorial concert at the Bottom Line. Roughly half the people knew Dave’s version the way he did it, but the others knew it from Peter, Paul and Mary’s variant or from someplace else and didn’t catch the dropped beats, and it took us forever to get it straight… and then, when we had it straight, David Bromberg showed up for the second show and tried to make us all do it in regular 4/4 instead of Dave’s way, because that was how he knew it…

To finish off, here are Courlander’s notes on the children’s game:

“The children form a circle with the leader in the center. The group sings ‘Green, green’ and the leader answers, ‘Rocky road,’ skipping around the ring. As the chorus is sung the leader is deciding which person to choose. As he picks one, the group sings the first line of the verse, naming the child selected. The leader brings his choice to the center and kisses her…”

Hence, “Tell me who you love, tell me who you love.”

Another classic Van Ronk guitar arrangement, this was also the first song I learned by Leroy Carr. Carr was a massively influential figure who virtually redefined blues in the late 1920s and early ’30s, turning it from rowdy, shouting dancehall, theater, or streetcorner music into a sensitive, moody style suited to late night meditations in quiet rooms with a glass of whiskey close at hand. His innovations were immeasurably aided by new technologies: first electrical recording, which could capture the intimate sound of crooners like Carr and Bing Crosby — the defining male singers in blues and pop for the next few decades — and then the popularity of jukeboxes, which supplanted pianos as the main barroom music devices when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Carr’s records became jukebox staples, along with recordings by his myriad followers and imitators, earning innumerable nickels in the slow hours before closing time.

This was probably the first Carr song I heard, thanks to Paul Oliver’s two-LP anthology, The Story of the Blues, issued to accompany his book of the same name. More than any other collection of that early reissue period, Oliver’s set suggested not only the depth and brilliance, but also the range of early blues, with Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong alongside deep Delta guitarists, the Georgia fiddler Eddie Anthony (his “Georgia Crawl” may have been my favorite cut on the album), and this track from Carr and his guitar-playing partner, Scrapper Blackwell.

A lot of urban revivalists considered Carr and Blackwell too smooth for their tastes — romantic adolescent lads in New York, Cambridge, and London were turning to blues for dark Delta shouters, not moody, gentle singers who played spare, evocative piano — but Van Ronk was very much an exception. Despite his reputation as a hoarse shouter, he loved Carr (and Crosby), and made careful study both of Blackwell’s guitar style and of Carr’s laconic piano chording. As he wrote in the liner notes to “Midnight Hour Blues”:

Sparseness is a good thing if you want to be pretty. Silence — a pause — is as important to music as a note. Silence is a part of music.
All those nice big fat thirds I got from Leroy Carr. The guitar is as close as I can get to a transcription of his lead piano part.

Another of my favorite Dave Van Ronk guitar arrangements, and a perfect example of how he would edit an accompaniment down to its absolute essentials. His model was one of Bessie Smith’s greatest records, featuring Louis Armstrong on cornet and Fred Longshaw playing unobtrusive piano. Other guitarists faced with Smith’s more ragtime-influenced blues records tend to get complicated and work out intricate arrangements that mimic piano ragtime, but Dave was thinking as a singer and wanted something that would support his vocal, not distract from it. The result is a singer’s dream, gently swinging while leaving plenty of space.

The lyric was one of Smith’s best, and she is credited as co-writer with someone named Stuart Balcom, or sometimes John Henry — there are internet sites that suggest these are the same person, but I have no idea what their source is. John Henry, as best I can find, was a pseudonym for Perry Bradford, composer of numerous blues songs including the original breakthrough hit by a black recording artist, Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,”and since Balcom seems to have no other songs to his credit, he might be another Bradford mask.

In any case, it’s a wonderful song, and a good example of the kind of lyrics that were more popular back when blues was mainly women’s music, in terms both of the performers and the audience. Actually, among black listeners the blues audience is still overwhelmingly female and the theme of the aging male lover getting traded in on a more recent model is still popular. As Moms Mabley used to say, “The only thing an old man can do for me is take a message to a young man.”

(Mabley also used to say, “Making love to an old man, honey? Making love to an old man is like pushing a car up a hill…

…with a rope.”)