The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk

fantastic collection of 78s, and his idea was to provide an overview of the range of styles being played in rural America at the dawn of recording. That set became our bible. It is how most of us first heard Blind Willie Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, and even Blind Lemon Jefferson. And it was not just blues people, by any means. It had ballad singers, square-dance fiddling, gospel congregations. It was an incredible compendium of American traditional musics, all performed in the traditional styles. That was very important for my generation, especially those of us I consider the “neo-ethnics,” because we were trying not only to
sing traditional songs but also to assimilate the styles of the rural players. Without the Harry Smith Anthology we could not have existed, because there was no other way for us to get hold of that material.
    We did not all like everything on those records; some of it was terrible. But it was all important to us, simply because it showed us what was out there and how it really sounded. For almost the first time, it gave us a sense of what traditional music in the United States was all about, from the source rather than from second- and thirdhand interpreters. The Anthology had eighty-two cuts on it, and after a while we all knew every word of every song, including the ones we hated. They say that in the nineteenth-century British Parliament, when a member would begin to quote a classical author in Latin, the entire House would rise in a body and finish the quote along with him. It was like that. The Anthology provided us with a classical education that we all shared in common, whatever our personal differences. And it also started the whole reissue business—pretty soon Folkways had out an album of Uncle Dave Macon, one of Blind Willie Johnson, and then other labels picked up the ball.
    Once again I have to stress that none of us was just listening to blues, or just listening to old-time music. Someone would go off to Mexico or Greece and come back with a few new songs, or someone would stumble across an album of African cabaret music and learn a couple of tunes—that’s where I picked up one of my favorites, a Liberian song called “Chicken Is Nice.” And all of this was going into the same meat grinder. The one limiting factor was the insistence on “authenticity,” on reproducing the traditional ethnic styles, all the way down to getting the accents right. It did not matter if you were ethnic à la Furry Lewis, or à la Jimmie Rodgers, or à la Earl Scruggs; that was a matter of personal taste. But that it should be authentically ethnic was a matter of principle.
    As an erstwhile mouldy fig, I was right at home. The neo-ethnics were in exactly the same position vis-à-vis folk music that I had been in jazz—with the key difference that this was a new movement, while in jazz I had arrived too late to get in on the excitement. With the benefit of hindsight I can see that we were making a lot of the same mistakes, but we also gained some of the same benefits. When you listen to the early New Orleans revivalists, people like Lu Watters and the other West Coast players, they were trying to recreate the music of the teens and twenties, but what actually
happened was that they unwittingly created a new kind of music. It was not the music they set out to make in the first place, but it stands on its own merits, not on whether or not it is an accurate reflection of King Oliver and the Creole Jazz Band. And that is a good thing, because King Oliver’s music had already been made. Now, the same thing was happening with us on the folk scene. I was taking these old records as my models, but what was really happening—though I might well have denied this at the time—was that I was developing a style and approach that was quite different from what I was hearing. Even when I tried to sound exactly like Leadbelly, I could not do it, so I ended up sounding like Dave Van Ronk. And that process was