{"id":1203,"date":"2016-05-27T07:00:50","date_gmt":"2016-05-27T11:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=1203"},"modified":"2024-03-14T10:37:23","modified_gmt":"2024-03-14T14:37:23","slug":"green-rocky-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/green-rocky-road\/","title":{"rendered":"Green Rocky Road (Len Chandler, Bob Kaufman, etc.)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Green Rocky Road\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Vnj69X9L9gQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>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. <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1207 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/len-chandler.jpeg?resize=225%2C210&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"len chandler\" width=\"225\" height=\"210\" \/>Chandler had been a classical oboe player in Akron, Ohio, and Dave recalled <em>Variety<\/em> referring to him as &#8220;musician turned folksinger.&#8221; 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 &#8212; there is an incredibly rare LP released on the very short-lived Gaslight label called\u00a0<em>The Beat Generation<\/em>, 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).<\/p>\n<p>Both Dave and Chandler remember hearing the traditional version of \u201cGreen, Green Rocky Road\u201d from the poet Bob Kaufman, who had learned it as a child in New Orleans. It was a popular African American <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-1208 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Bob-Kaufman3.jpg?resize=164%2C191&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Bob Kaufman3\" width=\"164\" height=\"191\" \/>children&#8217;s game song throughout the South, and there&#8217;s a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=I1qUCn3V1PA\">nice version recorded by Harold Courlander in Alabama <\/a>that was issued by Folkways in the early 1950s. In Dave&#8217;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&#8217;s apartment.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s repertoire, as well as one of his fundamental<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-1210 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Dave-Van-Ronk10-copy.jpg?resize=150%2C261&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Dave Van Ronk10 copy\" width=\"150\" height=\"261\" \/> 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&#8217;s version the way he did it, but the others knew it from Peter, Paul and Mary&#8217;s variant or from someplace else and didn&#8217;t catch the dropped beats, and it took us forever to get it straight&#8230; 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&#8217;s way, because that was how he knew it&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>To finish off, here are Courlander&#8217;s notes on the children&#8217;s game:<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1209 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Ring-Game-songs.jpg?resize=200%2C211&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Ring Game songs\" width=\"200\" height=\"211\" \/>&#8220;The children form a circle with the leader in the center. The group sings &#8216;Green, green&#8217; and the leader answers, &#8216;Rocky road,&#8217; 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&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Hence, &#8220;Tell me who you love, tell me who you love.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8220;musician turned folksinger.&#8221; As Chandler recalls it, Dave &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/green-rocky-road\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Green Rocky Road (Len Chandler, Bob Kaufman, etc.)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - 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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\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Gaslight cafe","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Gaslight-cafe-300x249.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":283,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/name-of-the-game\/","url_meta":{"origin":1203,"position":1},"title":"Name of the Game Is Stud (Tom Paxton, The Gaslight)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"February 22, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Tom Paxton's ode to the late-night poker games upstairs from the Kettle of Fish and the Gaslight Cafe on MacDougal Street during the heyday of the Greenwich Village folk scene.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"ain-t-that-news","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/ain-t-that-news.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2549,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/losers\/","url_meta":{"origin":1203,"position":2},"title":"Losers (Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"February 25, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Dave Van Ronk intended this to be the title song of the album we ended up calling Going Back to Brooklyn -- he was proud of the song and thought as a title it would be suitably ironic, especially considering his economic situation at the time. However,\u00a0 his manager thought\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Going-Back-to-Brooklyn-e1685415601248.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1824,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/bad-dream-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1203,"position":3},"title":"Bad Dream Blues (Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 25, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Though Dave Van Ronk was not principally known as a songwriter, he wrote some damn good songs. But before he got into songwriting in more ambitious ways, he recorded a handful of blues songs for which he took author credit. He didn't consider these fully original compositions, since they had\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"blues project","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/blues-project-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1645,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/hesitation-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1203,"position":4},"title":"Hesitation Blues (deep history of a dirty blues)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 11, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I heard this one, yet again, from Dave Van Ronk, who got it from Reverend Gary Davis,* but either of us could have learned it from any number of other sources. Indeed, this song became somewhat a bane of my existence in the 1970s, because whenever some musician or musicians\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Gary-Davis-LP2-297x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1656,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/swinging-on-a-star\/","url_meta":{"origin":1203,"position":5},"title":"Swinging on a Star (Van Ronk\/Bing Crosby)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 14, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Along with being a fine musician, awesomely well-read, and one of the most intelligent people I've ever met, Dave Van Ronk could be supremely silly. His W.C. Fields imitation was legendary and I treasure his recordings of \"Teddy Bear's Picnic,\" \"I Want to Go Back to My Little Grass Shack\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Dave as clown","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Dave-as-clown.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1203"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5072,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions\/5072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}