The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk Page A

happening to a lot of us, just by playing the music, listening to each other, and finding out what worked for us and what didn’t.
    Of course, all of this was not just happening at Washington Square. There was a constant round of parties, jam sessions, song swapping, and hootenannies. The interest was obsessive, to the point that for a while there, except for my political friends, I did not associate with anyone who was not involved in folk music in one way or another. That kind of passionate attention pays off, in terms of being able to learn songs, play, sing, or whatever one needs to do. I was learning more music, and learning it faster, than I have ever done before or since.
    The most regular venue for our get-togethers was a coffeehouse on MacDougal Street called the Caricature. This was not like the later coffeehouses that would emerge on that block, in that it was by no means a performance space. It was a tiny place, with an even tinier back room where we were permitted—permitted, mind you—to pick and sing, as long as we did not disturb the marathon bridge games out front. It was a snug, I suppose you would call it, with just room enough for two tables and some benches. The owner was a woman named Liz, and she had the patience of a saint. She would be out there trying to play bridge, with all of us flailing and wailing in the background, and just once in a while she would come back and say, “We’ve got a very, very difficult rubber going. Could you keep it down a little bit?” She did like the music, though she rarely commented on it, and she was very good to us. If it had not been for her cheeseburgers on the cuff, I probably would have died. She made great cheeseburgers, and the free ones were the biggest and the best. She was altogether a great lady, although she also could be tough when she had to be.
She ran me out once or twice, and I remember her running other people out as well.
    As best I can recall, the person who brought me down to the Caricature was Roy Berkeley, the Traveling Trotskyist Troubadour. At that time, Roy was hanging out with the Shachtmanites, another fringe-left group, and I was with the anarchists, and the Shachtmanites were among the only people who would talk to us. He was also one of the central figures over at the Caricature, and there were several people who started to hang out there because they were drawn to the Shachtmanites, for whatever reason, and then followed Roy down to the scene. As usual, it was a constantly shifting crew, but some of the regulars in that circle whom I have not mentioned up to now would have been Pete Goldsmith, Paul Schoenwetter, Perry Lederman, Curly Baird, Marty Jukovsky, Dorothy Carter, Bruce Langhorne, and Dave Woods. Dave was a big influence on me, because he was a real musician, a jazz guitarist who had studied with Lennie Tristano and did some country blues picking for his own amusement. He knew theory, knew how all the chords worked and how to build an arrangement, and he was only too happy to show me or anyone else who asked. I latched onto him, and it was like having coffee with Einstein a few times a week.
    Quite a few of the regulars did not play but just enjoyed hanging out and listening to the music. There was Roland Dumontet, for example, who was something of a Mack the Knife character—God knows what all he was mixed up in. He was part of the motorcycle crowd, and always got the best-looking women. Women did not say Roland’s name, they swooned it. He was just perfectly creepy, with one drooping eyelid and an air of lurking menace. (Which is as good a moment as any to mention that one of the advantages of both anarchism and folk music was the number of young women who seemed to be attracted to the scene. Some were singers, but a lot just hung out on the fringes, and the anarchists were all deeply committed to the principle of “free love.” The Caricature drew a bunch of girls from Music and Performing Arts High, and there were