Dave Van Ronk: Live In Monterey

Videos by American Songwriter

Dave Van Ronk
Live In Monterey
(Omnivore)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Dave Van Ronk was never a household name during his lifetime, though many of the singers who slept on his Greenwich Village couch became renowned heroes of the 1960s folk revival. Still, Van Ronk has always had a modest, devoted following, for the legendary hospitality that earned him the title “The Mayor of MacDougal Street,” as well as for his gruff yet nuanced style, which showcases the blues as a living tradition, constantly borrowing from jazz and popular music. Van Ronk never made the fatal mistake of putting the blues on a pedestal as a dry, historical subject; he consistently played them as a special kind of entertainment, lively storytelling full of colorful, complex characters and raw emotion.

In the wake of the Coen Brothers’ 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis, which is inspired by – though definitely not based on – Van Ronk’s memoir, a wider audience knows the stories. If they want to know the man behind them, this recording isn’t a bad place to start. Besides original songs like the delightfully acid-tongued “Losers,” the material includes arrangements written or made popular by Rev. Gary Davis and Mississippi John Hurt, legendary bluesmen from whom Van Ronk learned the songs himself, and which he’d been playing for forty years when this concert in California was recorded in the spring of 1998. The sound is clear, direct, and unvarnished, though few recordings of Van Ronk are overburdened by production. Mastered with a very light touch, the ragged shouts that sometimes follow his whispers can make the listener jump – but that’s intentional on Van Ronk’s part, and comes across as it would have in person.

Only one thing keeps Live In Monterey from being an essential album: the stories he told between songs at his final concert, recorded in 2001 and released in 2004 as … and the tin pan bended, and the story ended, made that record radiate an intimate warmth, and they’re missing here, either because Van Ronk did not perform them, or they were edited out.

Stephen Trageser