City Desk: A Village Voice

National Review, Sept 1, 2003 by Richard Brookhiser

When Uday and Qusay passed over, one's thoughts turned to appropriate eulogists: Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, Christopher Hitchens. My thoughts turned to an old song about a crooked cop, "Duncan and Brady." In stanza one we meet Brady, riding an electric car (which dates the song), and itching to shoot someone "just to see him die." This is what happens:

Well Duncan, Duncan was tending the bar. Along came Brady with his shiny star. Brady says, "Duncan, you are under arrest." Mm-hmm, Duncan shot a hole right in Brady's chest. He'd been on the job too long. The song moves through autopsy, funeral, and reax, and includes this epitaph: Well Brady Brady Brady, you know you done wrong, Breaking in here while things were going on, Breaking in windows, knocking down doors. Now you're lying dead on the barroom floor. You've been on the job too long.

Best of all is that little refrain, a one-sentence essay in political philosophy. All despots have been on the job too long. I learned "Duncan and Brady" from a CD of Dave Van Ronk, a Greenwich Village folk singer whose career is a case study in the transmission of style, and sometimes wisdom.

Van Ronk was a native New Yorker, born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, who was expelled from high school "for mopery and general moral turpitude," as he put it in a set of liner notes. He shipped with the Merchant Marine, played jazz banjo and guitar, then found himself in the late '50s in the Village, where folk singers congregated in Washington Square Park on Sunday afternoons. Folk singing still bore the scarlet letter of the Henry Wallace campaign, half Communism, half moral uplift. "The sight and sound of happily howling Stalinists offended my assiduously nurtured self-image as a hipster," Van Ronk remembered. "To this day, I cherish a deep-seated loathing for anything that smacks of good, clean fun." But he sought the best, and strained it through his own knobbly sensibility.

Van Ronk's voice was a blunt instrument, renowned in those pre-amped days for sheer volume (he called himself the "hog-calling champion of upper MacDougal Street"). But he had learned his blue notes and his cracked notes from listening to Louis Armstrong, and he could be insinuating or sly as the songs required. His guitar playing was clear as water. His recordings from the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, on labels like Folkways, form a primer for an era. One listens, undistracted by the later fame and shenanigans that trail Bob Dylan (a Van Ronk protege) or Joan Baez.

The most striking feature of Van Ronk's early repertoire is its ecumenicism. There is blues and black religious music; one of the presiding spirits is the Rev. Gary Davis, a blind guitar-playing street preacher from South Carolina who moved to New York and taught a generation of finger- pickers. But there are also Irish songs, sea chanteys, and ballads from England by way of Appalachia. There is as much black and white as on a piano keyboard. The subject matter is equally catholic. Lust is there in full throat, but so are songs of death and the hereafter. Jelly Roll Morton's disgusting "Winin' Boy"-"Sister sister, dirty little sow, / You tryin' to be a bad girl and you don't know how"-keeps company with "Just a Closer Walk with Thee"-"In this world of doubt and snares, / If I falter, Lord, who cares?"

Van Ronk brought humor to his work, rare enough in a musician. Typically the funk of all those evenings in coffee houses, playing for small crowds, issues in bitterness; in him it issued in laughs. "Georgie on the I.R.T." sends up lugubrious ballads about heroic railroad engineers. The scene is Times Square, at 5:15 on a Friday evening. Georgie, the commuter-hero, tries to board a Brooklyn-bound train ("for Brooklyn was his home"), but is caught by the closing door.

So when you ride the IRT and you come in Times Square Incline your head a few degrees and say a solemn prayer. His body lies between the ties, amidst the dust and dew; His head it rides the I.R.T. to Flatbush Avenue. Some of Van Ronk's songs won't say what they mean. "Cocaine Blues," one of his quasi-hits, might be a hymn to addiction, unless it is a warning from the drug czar. Cocaine's for horses, not for men. They tell me it'll kill me, but they don't say when.

But other songs mean one simple thing. The pentatonic ballad "Fair and Tender Ladies" is the plaint of a young woman wronged in her love. By the alchemy of seriousness, Van Ronk turns his rough voice, made rougher by the punishingly slow tempo he takes, into that of a young woman, self- abnegating, sorrow-full.

I wish I was a little sparrow And I had wings and could fly so high. I'd fly to the arms of my false true lover, And there I'd be content to die.

Why is hearing this wisdom? Because sympathy instructs the heart.

Most of these songs come from the funky fields of the republic, from long- ago farms and small towns. Nothing could be farther from Stephen Sondheim. But they found a home in New York too. The city was a place to learn and play them, and send them back out into the world, maybe with a new twist. As it does with money, rumors, and arguments, New York takes greedily and gives generously.