Dave Van Ronk was my mentor in so many ways: as a model of musical taste, a guitar teacher, a friend, a guide to fine writers and serious historians… It is not an exaggeration to say I have no idea who I would be or what I would be doing if I had not turned up on his doorstep at age seventeen, eager to learn whatever he was willing to teach.

I arrived at a good moment, from my point of view, and, in a way, from his. It was a bad time in his life, a low point when he was feeling like the world had passed him by, and there I was, an eager young acolyte. I had the right background: I auditioned at my first lesson with Willie McTell’s “Georgia Rag,” and had grown up on Woody Guthrie, and had read a lot of the right books (Mark Twain, for example), and was young and ready to spend long nights eating his amazing meals, listening to him talk for hour upon hour, and drinking in his wisdom (and less than my share of his whiskey).

Often, late in those evenings, he would put on music he thought I should hear. It was almost never blues or folk: the favorites were Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, the Koutev Ensemble’s recording of Balkan songs, and various pop singers he valued: Hoagy Carmichael, Jo Stafford, and, especially, Bing Crosby.

I hadn’t expected that. Crosby, to me, was a name from a distant and generally uninteresting past. I’d grown up in a world of folk, blues, jazz, rock, some country, some classical… but absolutely not what I and everyone around me regarded as pop tripe. No one in my world considered Sinatra hip; he was the antithesis of hip, a dinosaur symbolizing the boring, stultifying, conservative junk that all the musicians I liked were rejecting.

I don’t recall Dave ever having a good word for Sinatra, but Crosby was another story. He was one of Dave’s favorite singers, a pioneering white jazz artist who had come up alongside Bix Beiderbeck, Frankie Trumbauer, and the Dorsey Brothers. Dave also liked a lot of Crosby’s later recordings–he’d grown up with Crosby’s radio program and had a relationship that went beyond the music–just as he loved Louis Armstrong’s later recordings, but the album he played for me was a selection of early jazz  cuts, on the Biograph label, which I knew from albums of Willie McTell, Skip James, and Gary Davis — again, not the company in which I would have expected to find Crosby. So I borrowed it, recorded it on cassette, and later bought my own copy.

In hindsight, I don’t remember much of that record, but I loved “My Honey’s Loving Arms,” and still do. A large part of the attraction was that the “band” that backed Crosby through much of it and took the first “instrumental” break was the Mills Brothers, doing their vocal imitations of horns and bass. I’d never heard them, didn’t realize at first that they weren’t in fact playing instruments, and was entranced. Crosby worked with them brilliantly, matching their relaxed swing and floating over their harmonies. Then, for the second break, the real instruments came in, with Joe Venuti and the Dorsey’s. All in all,  it’s a wonderful record.

The song itself is pretty standard fare, at least in terms of the lyrics. The chords are nice, and I think it was one of the first songs I worked up in F, when I was beginning to realize what a great key that is for fingerstyle swing.

Finally, I just looked up what a “Morris chair” is, and it turns out to be exactly what I imagined: an early sort of cushioned reclining chair, ideal for cuddling, which is the pleasant theme of this song.