The golden days of Greenwich Village

This multitudinous chronicle is not the story of the folk music revival. Rather, it’s not only the story of the folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s through the early 1980s. Ambitiously, sometimes overwhelmingly, but always fascinatingly, David Browne – a senior editor at Rolling Stone – composes his book of interconnected stories stemming from jazz, blues, folk, folk-rock and all the complementing, competing musical genres that could define what’s been played in the basement nightclubs and coffee houses in this small area of New York City since the early 20th century.

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He takes his title from the talkin’ blues, the direct ancestor of rap, and he is, like the writers of those blues, a born storyteller. Gliding from the founding of the Village itself (Greenwich means ‘green village’, so the Village is redundant), through the opening of Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard in February 1935, up to the somewhat idiosyncratic choice of Suzanne Vega on Cornelia Street in the mid-1980s, Browne leaves out very little. He memorialises the venues themselves like a Victorian writer turning a debtors’ prison or house on the high moors into a character, brings into focus musicians only slightly regarded or near-forgotten who deserve every bit of credit he gives them, and celebrates both the living and the dead.

There must be some organising figure for a book this detailed and vast, and, rightly, it is Dave Van Ronk. The Brooklyn-born Van Ronk was a singer, multi-instrumentalist, music historian and scholar, and he knew it all: Robert Johnson’s blues, Scott Joplin’s ragtime, jazz, gospel, ancient ballads, sea shanties, and what had just been written in a cellar or garret by a friend that very week.