Listening to Prestige 553: Dave Van Ronk

LISTEN TO ONE: Stackerlee

In the early 1960s, Prestige experimented with a bunch of subsidiary labels. The significant ones, of course, were Bluesville, Swingville and Moodsville, but there were others.

Prestige Lively Arts mostly featured spoken word recordings. Here are a few: Roddy McDowall Reads the Horror Stories of H.P. Lovecraft, Burgess Meredith Reads Ray Bradbury,  Larry Storch Reads Philip Roth, James Mason Reads Edgar Allen Poe, James Mason Reads Herman Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener, Morris Carnovsky Reads Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. These really are as fascinating as they sound, and YouTube has most of them.

Prestige Irish was what it sounds like, and it was the shortest-lived of the bunch, with only three titles; much more complete was Prestige International, which had folk music of many different countries, but mostly the British Isles. There was some American folk music also, but then a new label, Prestige Folklore, was started in response to the folk boom. One of the folk artists featured was Dave Van Ronk, and it's hard to pass him by without a mention. He recorded an extensive list of the traditional folk and blues songs he loved, 13 of which were released on a Prestige International LP, 12 more on Prestige Folklore.

In 1963 he was back in the studio, this time the Van Gelder studio, to record again, with a traditional jazz band, and that gets him back into the purview of this blog, so we'll take it up when the time comes. 

Not much to add here about Van Ronk. He was a powerful figure in the folk music revival of the 1960s, known as "the Mayor of McDougal Street" for his presence on the New York folkie coffee house scene, and he made some wonderful records. Oh, and an anecdote. At about the time he was making these records for Prestige, he did a concert at Brown University, where my brother, Jonathan Richards, was the resident cartoonist for the campus newspaper. They asked him to do a drawing of Van Ronk to promote the concert, but did not provide him with any pictures. So he did the best he could. He drew a burly guy hunched over a guitar, head down, so that all you could see was hair and beard.  Van Ronk must have liked it. He used it on his business card for several years after that.

In 1964, Prestige closed all its subsidiary labels.