Listening to Prestige 598: Dave Van Ronk

LISTEN TO ONE: Cake Walkin' Babies 
from Home

 Dave Van Ronk was the keeper of the flame of traditional American music, playing and singing songs from the tradition even as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Ian Tyson and others made the singer-songwriter the new face of the American folk scene. Van Ronk's gravelly voice, his passion, his encyclopedic knowledge of songs. and his support for the music, the musicians that made it, and the clubs that featured it made him a mainstay of New York's folk music world, to the extent that he became familiarly known as "the Mayor of MacDougal Street."

Van Ronk's first love had been traditional jazz, and he started off playing the tenor banjo and banjola (banjo neck, mandolin body) around New York. But

there was not much call for a young jazz banjo player in the Mecca of bebop. Traditional jazz still existed in clubs like Nick's and Jimmy Ryan's, Eddie Condon's and the Metropole, but they showcased the great veterans of the jazz wars, and there wasn't much chance for a young New York kid who "wanted to play traditional jazz in the worst way...and did!" But while digging around in the bins of stores like the Record Haven on 6th Avenue for traditional jazz 78s he started finding blues records by performers like Furry Lewis, and a new world started to open up for him. New stores like Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street gave him access to a whole new world of records, and Harry Smith's six-album Anthology of American Folk Music on Folkways gave him, and other young folk enthusiasts of his era, a wide open window into that world. 

Van Ronk soon found himself recording for Folkways, and becoming an important figure in the blossoming folk revival, but he never forgot his first love, and the Prestige Folklore imprint gave him a chance to pay tribute to it.

The Red Onion Jazz Band was one of those groups of scrappy revivalists that formed in the 1950s, wanting to play oldtime jazz in the worst way, and staying with it long enough that they learned how to play it in a pretty good way. The band stayed together and played together well into the new millenium.

The session was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's cathedral of jazz sound in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, and it's a tribute to Van Gelder's genius that he captures the ragged-but-right, 78 RPM ambience of the Onions and Van Ronk. The band only plays on about half the cuts, the others being given over to Van Ronk's customary acoustic blues style.

The album, called In the Tradition, was released on Prestige's Folklore line rather than its Swingville line, which was probably appropriate. Two 45 RPM singles were also released. The first paired "Cake Walking Babies From Home" and "St. Louis Tickle." The former, composed by Clarence Williams, had originally been recorded by the ensemble that inspired the name of the New York band, the Red Onion Jazz Babies, out of New Orleans and featuring Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Lil Hardin (later Lil Armstrong). The latter was of even older vintage, having first been recorded by the Ossman-Dudley Trio in 1906. One other recording was made of the tune in 1924, but it's likely that it was an Ossman-Dudley 78 from which Van Ronk rescued this song from oblivion. Since then, it's been recorded by several others, including Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Van Ronk plays it as a solo acoustic guitar instrumental.

The other 45 was headed by a Bob Dylan song, "If I Had to Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You." This was a bawdy, uptempo number that Dylan had sung a couple of times in club dates, and Van Ronk had liked. Dylan was regarded as an up and coming talent, but Van Ronk was doing him a favor by recording one of his songs--a favor that he would very shortly not need, as at around the same time, Peter Paul and Mary were recording "Blowin' in the Wind." Dylan's song was taken as a jazz number with the Red Onions, as was the flip side, "Ace in the Hole," a Depression-era ditty that's become a jug band and music hall standard.