Dave Van Ronk: Ballads, Blues & A Spiritual [FOLKWAYS]

Why you'll love it

This Folkways reissue brings back the Greenwich Village fixture's first album, produced by Kenneth S. Goldstein. Van Ronk works through traditional folk and blues standards like "In The Pines," "John Henry" and "Careless Love" with that famous gravel voice.

About the album

They called him the Mayor of MacDougal Street, and he earned the title the old-fashioned way: by being in every coffeehouse in Greenwich Village, helping every young singer who wandered in, and knowing more songs than any of them. Dave Van Ronk was a Brooklyn kid who loved New Orleans jazz and country blues in equal measure, and in 1959 Folkways gave him his first LP.

It's just Van Ronk, his guitar and that big, rumbling voice. "Duncan And Brady" and "Betty And Dupree" are classic ballads, "Black Mountain Blues" and "Backwater Blues" come from the Bessie Smith songbook, "Twelve Gates To The City" is a rousing spiritual, and "Winin' Boy" nods to Jelly Roll Morton. His fingerpicking is as tidy as his singing is rough, which is the whole charm, and "K.C. Moan" and "Gambler's Blues" lean toward the jug-band and jazz sides of his taste.

Billboard reviewed it in May 1959, and the album later turned up again as Gambler's Blues and Black Mountain Blues. Three titles for one record is a lot of admin, but the songs held up through every one of them.

Also at Kops: more Dave Van Ronk on vinyl · browse Folk

Tracklist

Listen

On Folkways (cat# FS 3818), a reissue of the 1959 album.