All Kindsa Music Mag

By Brendan Casey

The early 1960s folk music scene in Greenwich Village, New York was such a special time and place in American history, but today, I feel like so many artists get consistently overshadowed (and man, I don’t want to say it makes sense, but like…it does make sense) by the legend and lore of Bob Dylan.

Yes, he changed the game. In the second wave of musicians on the scene, he traveled from Minnesota to New York City and had a great understanding of the folk music tradition, the great American songbook, and eventually had an incredible knack for writing great original music – something that wasn’t totally common in a music scene caught up in revival and preservation of traditional folk music.

BUT- if there is one folk singer from that time and place that I wish was a household name just as much as old Zim, it’s Dave Van Ronk.

Van Ronk was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Queens, played in a barbershop quartet, ditched high school to become a Merchant Marine, and began playing tenor banjola in traditional jazz bands in the city before fingerpicking his way into folk, jazz, and blues music on the acoustic guitar. 

He was larger than life – charismatic, articulate in everything from cooking to Trotskyism, and was well loved – enough to be dubbed the “Mayor of MacDougal Street”. Go watch Inside Lllewn Davis, written and directed by the Coen Brothers – it’s roughly based on Dave Van Ronk’s life in Greenwich Village, and is named after his 1964 album Inside Dave Van Ronk.

While he wrote some original tunes such as “Bad Dream Blues” and “Bamboo”, he was particularly skilled at rearranging songs both traditional and current. His arrangement of the Appalachian (though it has roots dating back to 17th century England) folk song “House of the Rising Sun” was covered and recorded by Bob Dylan on his 1962 self-titled debut album. (There’s a funny story about this – Dylan apparently asked Van Ronk if he could use his arrangement on the album, but Van Ronk said he was planning on recording it for himself – Dylan basically said “Uh oh” since it was already being pressed on the album, and Van Ronk stopped playing it because now everyone knew it as a Dylan song). Dylan’s cover of the tune was then heard by these guys in England called The Animals, who then covered it themselves, making it a number one hit in the US and UK, thus sparking the folk-rock movement…the rest is history.

Along with “House of the Rising Sun”, Joni Mitchell said in a 1968 interview “Frank Sinatra just recorded ‘Both Sides Now”, “But my favorite version of the song is by Dave Van Ronk.”

Think about that. 

Out of them all, my favorite Dave Van Ronk cover is his rendition of “Green, Green Rocky Road” on his 1963 album In The Tradition.

While the song was copyrighted by Len Chandler (fantastic folk musician) and Bob Kaufman (iconic Beat poet), two African-American Greenwich Village regulars (huge shoutout to Joop’s Musical Flowers for the deep research on the origins of this tune), the song was originally in the form of an African-American children’s play song, and can be traced in writing as far back as 1922, as it was titled as “Green Oak Tree! Rocky O” and published in a book titled Negro Folk Rhymes (Wise and Otherwise) by Thomas Washington Talley. Talley was a black professor at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and a collector of African-American folk songs – doing God’s work right there.

“Green Rocky Road” then popped up again, recorded in 1939 by Herbert Halpert, sung by three children in Tupelo, Mississippi – then again in the same year by historian Ruby T. Lomax (wife of musicologist John Lomax) in Merryville, Louisiana, sung by Ruthie May Farr and Wilford Jerome Fisher. 

In 1950, it was also recorded by children at Lilly’s Chapel School down in York, Alabama. The recording was included on a 1953 Folkways album titled Ring Games: Line Games and Play Party Songs of Alabama. The song takes you right into a schoolyard full of skipping and dancing children in the hot southern sun.

The story then goes that in 1961, Van Ronk was hanging out with Les Chandler and Bob Kaufman, the two whom the song is credited to. Kaufman had the words, Chandler created the arrangement, and boom. There it was. Is it their tune? Really, no. Were they the first to arrange it this way and copyright it? Yes, sort of a common practice in this time period when it came to “traditional” lyrics, with no one to credit them to.

Len Chandler says of the song: “Kaufman was at my $34 a month New York apartment on Stanton Street for dinner. I had already put the music together. Kaufman said, ‘Dooka dooka soda cracker/Does your momma chew tobacco?’ and I said, ‘If your momma chews tobacco/ Dooka dooka soda cracker.’ We were just playing.” Like “Green Rocky Road”’s origin as a game song, Chandler and Kaufman were still having fun with it.

So while it’s credited to Chandler/Kaufman, “Green Rocky Road” was very much steeped in African-American culture long before their connection, most likely far beyond the 1922 source – but Dave’s version is the first one (as far as I can tell or find) that pops up in Greenwich Village.  The earliest recorded version done by him can be traced back to July 29, 1961, recorded at Riverside Church in New York City for WRVR’s “Saturday of Folk Music” broadcast (Listen here –  it’s incredible and you get a taste of Van Ronk’s witty sense of humor).

It wasn’t until August of 1963 that “Green Rocky Road” was officially released on Van Ronk’s In The Tradition (the whole album is basically half Dixieland-style vocal jazz covers, half acoustic folk songs – it’s so Dave).

Phew.

Oh, the journey of a folk song – and it didn’t even end there – but I haven’t even dove into Dave’s actual song yet so I’m stopping myself here.

As you listen to Dave Van Ronk’s “Green Rocky Road”, it’s such a treat.

The song starts off with him fingerpicking his way through both the bass and melody of the song. Being such a student of music, he got down the intricate, alternating-thumb-three-finger-”Mississippi John Hurt”-style of fingerpicking so well, that his playing is incredibly delicate and careful. You would never know that he was 6 ‘3’’ and over 200 pounds with massive hands, just by listening to him.

It can put you in a trance if you listen closely to the picking style, especially due to the fact that he’s in drop-D tuning with a capo on the fifth fret, adding a bright, drone-like quality that can really absorb your mind. It puts you at peace.

As Dave begins to sing, you hear his fingerpicking doubling the melody – one of my favorite characteristics in folk and blues music. His unique, sometimes-booming-when-he-wants-to (listen to his version of “He Was a Friend of Mine”) voice enters the song softly, as if lulling you to sleep – kind of as if he’s giving the tune his own Mississippi John Hurt treatment. 

He sings: 

“When I go by Baltimore, need no carpet on my floor, come along and follow me, we’ll go down to Galilee”

“Green Green Rocky Road, promenade in green, tell me who ya love, tell me who ya love”

“Little Miss Jane, run to the wall, don’t you stumble don’t you fall, don’t you sing no don’t you shout, no when I sing come running out”.

“Green Green Rocky Road, promenade in green, tell me who ya love, tell me who ya love”

“See that crow up in the sky, he don’t walk no he just fly, he don’t walk no he don’t run, keep on flappin’ to the sun”

“Green Green Rocky Road, promenade in green, tell me who ya love, tell me who ya love”

So tender.

Folk music (to me) is and has always been about the words and the feeling the song delivers. As Dave sings through the tune, the words are held up on a platform for us to hear. We’re immediately met with the proposition of a journey, to follow him where he goes – by Baltimore, to Galilee- which adds a timeless biblical reference. Remember, it doesn’t have to geographically make sense – it’s a “play song” after all, but boy does it give you the feeling of wanting to get up and go. The feeling of freedom. The feeling of wanting to drop everything and skip down that green rocky road, running and singing. It’s a beautiful thing.

As a lover of naturalism in writing, the chorus just does it for me. 

“Green Green Rocky Road, promenade in green, tell me who ya love, tell me who ya love”

It paints a picture of an old gravel, moss covered road covered by a green canopy of leafy trees. There’s such a level of innocence to it all. It embodies that playfulness. It’s the type of music anyone can listen to and feel something from.

During the instrumental passage, Van Ronk’s impressive fingerpicking is highlighted once again. With the pattern’s bright, clean timbre and high pitch, his tender playing has a sort of music-box quality, adding to the song’s playful and gentle, lullaby-like feeling. 

Van Ronk’s vocal delivery on this track has him singing out the vowels at the end of each verse and chorus for an extended period of time, creating a sustaining beauty between his voice and the tonal center of the song. It’s a very pretty and tranquil thing to hear.

A lot of this harmonic beauty can be lent to the fact that the song revolves around the “I” chord and the tonal center for the vast majority of it before going to the “IV” (4) chord very quickly. The melody, which is very major sounding, is locked to it’s “home”, which not only makes the melody so memorable, but it dictates the entire song itself – remember, it’s origin is a game song for kids, like a schoolyard chant – it’s meant to be simple, and there can be so much beauty in simplicity like that.

Imagine a melody and lyrics with roots in African-American children’s games, paired with acoustic folk guitar playing from the early 1960’s Greenwich Village scene – birthed is Dave Van Ronk’s “Green Rocky Road” – but it doesn’t sound anything like urban metropolis New York City, does it?

Nope. None of that stuff really did.

I think a lot of that is due to the power and meaning of the folk music revival. There was a hunger for education and for the history of music. There was respect for the roots of songs, for their past, and for their culture. There was a deep appreciation for tradition in music that so many artists in the scene like Dave Van Ronk had. 

Respect and love for beautiful music.

It doesn’t get much better than that. Go listen to Dave Van Ronk’s “Green Rocky Road”, and maybe you too will get absorbed by it all.