The Mayor of MacDougal Street (4 page)

Would I ever! Folk music! Washington Square! Greenwich Village! I coolly said, “It might be amusing,” and we agreed to meet on the IND platform at Continental Avenue in Forest Hills.

When I arrived on Sunday, I barely recognized her. She was decked out in a leotard, a dirndl skirt, a Mexican peasant blouse, and silver hoop earrings. Her hair was ironed straight and tied back in a pony tail. I don’t recall what she had on her feet, but I like to think it was sandals. She eyed my Robert Hall slacks and sports shirt with undisguised contempt. “You look like a tourist,” she said. I noted the inflection she used when she said “tourist.” I was learning. Rochelle explained that these were her Village togs, which she wore on these occasions to “blend in.”

“With what?” I wondered, but I kept my mouth shut.

By this time I had heard and read a good deal about Greenwich Village. The phrase “quaint, old-world charm” kept cropping up, and I had a vivid mental picture of a village of half-timbered Tudor cottages with mullioned windows and thatched roofs, inhabited by bearded, bomb-throwing anarchists, poets, painters, and nymphomaniacs whose ideology was slightly to the left of “whoopee!”

Emerging from the subway at the West 4th Street station, I looked around in a state of shock.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “It looks just like fucking Brooklyn.”

I
nauspicious as it may have been, that first trip to Greenwich Village was the starting point for a desultory migration across the East River and into the life of a professional musician. There is no way I can sort out an exact chronology for this hegira, but it started around 1951 and continued in stages over the course of the next few years. I never officially left home, but I would go over to Manhattan and end up crashing on somebody’s floor overnight, and then it got to be two nights, then three, until eventually I was spending most of my time in Manhattan—though every few days I would make the trek back to Queens to change my underwear and see if I could mooch some money. Gradually these visits grew less frequent, and by the time I was about seventeen, I was living in Manhattan full-time.

Originally, my plan was to make a living playing jazz, and to that purpose I added yet another instrument to my musical armory: a tenor banjo. This probably requires some explanation, since it has been a good many years since anyone switched from guitar to banjo in order to be a jazz musician.

In the 1940s the jazz world had been rocked by what came to be known as the “mouldy fig wars.” During that period, a revival of interest in early jazz coincided with the beginnings of what is now called bebop. A duel to the death was proclaimed, and critics solemnly lined up: you were either a “progressive,” hailing the innovations of the boppers, or a warrior in the
defense of the traditional New Orleans style—a “mouldy fig.” In hindsight, both sides had their merits and both took their positions to ridiculous extremes. The modernists were aesthetic Darwinists, arguing that jazz had to progress and that later forms must necessarily be superior to earlier ones. The traditionalists were Platonists, insisting that early jazz was “pure” and that all subsequent developments were dilutions and degenerations. This comic donnybrook dominated jazz criticism for ten or fifteen years, with neither side capable of seeing the strengths of the other, until it finally subsided and died, probably from sheer boredom. Before that point, though, a lot of otherwise sensible people had made asses of themselves.
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I remember a friend during this period telling me that he had been on his way to some big jazz festival but had discovered that Charlie Parker was playing, and was so disgusted that he turned around and drove home. This made perfect sense to me.

Being an adolescent, I was naturally an absolutist, so as soon as I became aware that this titanic tempest in a teapot was going down, I had to jump one way or the other. As a result, I turned my back on a lot of good music. When I was twelve or thirteen, Charlie Christian was my favorite guitarist, I had amassed a huge collection of the Benny Goodman sextet, and I listened to bebop and modern jazz. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I had come to regard all of that music as a sorry devolution from the pure New Orleans style. I was convinced, intellectually and ideologically, that the traditionalists had the better of it, and that led me to a lot of good music, but it also led me away from a lot of good music and toward a lot of truly terrible music. It was an ideological judgment rather than a musical one, and it was stupid. It turned me on to Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong, but also led me to support any aggregation of toothless incompetents over Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker. I gave away all my Gillespie records and acquired recordings of old New Orleans relics, many of whom had probably never been very good even in their youth and prime.

I also switched from guitar to tenor banjo, since according to the canons of those times, guitar was not a proper instrument for a traditional jazz
band. (I have since seen pictures of the most canonical New Orleans jazz bands, such as Buddy Bolden’s, and they show guitars to have been at least as common as banjos back at the dawn of jazz, but I did not know that in 1953.) I did not like the banjo much—it clanged like some kind of wind-up toy, and I had trouble fitting my fingers on the neck—but there was a lot of pressure on me. So I switched over and quickly became one of the worst tenor banjo players on the trad scene. And to be the worst at tenor banjo, you’re really competing, because that’s a fast track. I couldn’t keep time in a bucket, I kept blowing the chord changes, and no sane jazz musician would ever have hired me, except for one thing: I had a loud voice and I didn’t mind taking vocals. A lot of people who played jazz at that point—and some even today—thought that taking vocals was
infra dignitatem:
a real jazz musician didn’t sing. (Just as a real jazz musician didn’t dance.) Exceptions were made for a few of the older guys, like Jack Teagarden or Louis Armstrong, but a lot of people stopped taking Mose Allison seriously as a pianist the minute he opened his mouth.

In addition, working in clubs that had no sound systems of any kind, anyone who wanted to be a singer had to be able to make do without a mike. I had a very loud voice—as some wit remarked at the time, “When Van Ronk takes a vocal, the hogs are restless for miles around”—and if the key was right, I could cut through a seven-piece band. (That was the standard trad outfit: trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piano, bass, drums, and of course a banjo. If there was a little extra money, they would sometimes add a second trumpet, because a lot of those guys liked the Yerba Buena’s two-trumpet sound.) So I took the vocals, and in return they would let me hold my banjo.

Thus, with my Vega in hand, I set out to be a professional jazzman. By that time I was already six foot two and weighed about 220 pounds. Six or seven months later, thanks to my devotion to jazz, I weighed 170. I didn’t have the sense God gave a duck. I had never starved before, and I had no idea of the great range of possibilities out there in the world—one of them being starvation. At first I was just sitting in occasionally with pick-up bands, and for a while a bunch of kids my own age also put together our own group. Since we thought we were a pretty clever bunch, we came up with a real thigh-slapper of a name: the Brute Force Jazz Band. We thought that was very witty; audiences thought it was very accurate. We
played where we could, at rare intervals and to no great acclaim, and then I ended up with a relatively steady organization called the Jazz Cardinals—though I was still doing pick-up work whenever I could get it. The Cardinals were led by a Dutchman named Eric Huystedt who sounded very much like Sidney Bechet, and we had a regular gig at a place called the Amber Lantern in New Jersey. Boy, did we get screwed! I remember one time we divvied up all the money we had made that evening, and it came to forty-seven cents each.

Those were the waning days of the trad-Dixieland revival. I was “just in time to be too late,” as the song says, and the trad scene was by then dominated by a bunch of cornballs in funny hats, moonlighting insurance execs, and a smattering of dedicated musicians eking out a meager existence by gumping meals at the Automat. (Gumping is when you race the busboy to an unfinished plate of food, finish it, and repeat the procedure until you are no longer hungry or you get thrown out, whichever comes first.) It was really slim pickings. Often you would play for union scale and then have to slip the owner something back under the table. You were lucky to get two gigs in a week; more often you would get one gig in two weeks. Trying to live on that, even in the golden fifties, wasn’t easy.

Still, I learned a lot by working with those bands. We were playing all the old chestnuts, things like “At the Jazz Band Ball” and “Fidgety Feet,” and I was picking up some relatively sophisticated chord changes, which gave me an enormous leg up a few years later when I got involved in the folk scene. The joke in the early 1960s was that I was the only folksinger in New York who knew how to play a diminished chord, and while that was not quite true, it does indicate what set me apart from a lot of the other people.

Most of the jobs I played were outside New York City, especially over in Jersey. There was a country club in West Orange, a place in Fort Lee. One of the nice things was that I got to meet some of the old-timers. One time, I did a benefit concert out at Welfare Island with a pick-up group, and Eubie Blake showed up; I vividly remember him playing “Baltimore Rag.” I also sat in on sessions at clubs like the Stuyvesant Casino and Child’s Paramount; I recall one night when the line-up included Miff Mole, Jimmy McPartland, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, and Ben
Webster, and there I was backing them.
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I played with Joe Sullivan a couple of times, and once with Jimmy Rushing. I could never have worked officially in those places because I was not a member of the AF of M, the musicians’ union, but they managed to squeeze me in. If the union delegate came by, Rushing or whoever was the titular leader would take over and I would get offstage. Of course, my instrument was still up there and the delegate knew perfectly well what was going on, but he wouldn’t do anything about it.

There is an apprenticeship system in jazz, so even if the older musicians were not personally all that accessible or friendly, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians. That is generally true of people who are serious about music. When the first Cro-Magnon started to bang on a bone, he was probably ready to show the second Cro-Magnon how to do it. Musicians are sweet people, and if you really care about music and want to learn, they will rally to you and do what they can to help you, even if you don’t know shit from Shinola.

Of all the older musicians, the one I remember most fondly was Clarence Williams. Clarence was originally a piano player out of New Orleans, and he had come up to New York around the time of World War I. By the early 1920s he had established himself as just about the key figure in jazz in New York, and he was well qualified for the role. He was a damn good piano player, but more than that, he was a composer and songwriter, a publisher, and what they called a “record contractor.” In those days, when a record company wanted to record some tunes, it would get hold of someone like Clarence and he would be given a budget to cut a certain number of sides. The rest was up to him: he would pick the tunes or write them himself, arrange them, pick the musicians, choose the recording studio, pay all the expenses, and whatever money was left over was his pay. Clarence arranged a lot of sessions for other people, and also plenty for himself under various names, the most famous of which was Clarence Williams and His Blue Five, a shifting group that at times included people like Louis Armstrong.

Where Clarence really earned his place in history, though, was when the blues boom took off. Around 1920, there was a fluke hit, a thing called “Crazy Blues,” recorded by a black singer named Mamie Smith. It came out of left field and sold close to a million copies, and all the commercial record companies immediately went into feeding-frenzy mode. One of them, Okeh records, called Clarence and said, “We want one of those.” So Clarence went down south on a talent hunt and came back to New York with this hot young blues singer, and her name was Bessie Smith. Following the old rule of “finders, keepers,” Clarence became the contractor for Bessie’s early records. That meant that he not only played piano on a lot of them but got to write—and more importantly, publish—the songs, which was where the money was.

When I knew Clarence, he was retired and had a little place on 125th Street called the Harlem Thrift Shop. It was his office and hangout—as far as I could see, he never actually sold anything out of there. All that he had in that shop was his own self and two pianos. It was a tiny place, but he squeezed the second piano in there because what he was running was a kind of clearinghouse for piano players. If some out-of-town pianist was passing through New York, he would stop by to say hello to Clarence, and of course a lot of piano players lived in the city as well. So there I was, at sixteen and seventeen years old, sitting in a corner and listening to Clarence Williams play piano duets with James P. Johnson or Willie “The Lion” Smith or Joe Sullivan, people like that. I would sit in a corner, with my eyes like saucers. I mean, I was a schmucky little kid in some ways, but I was not so dumb that I didn’t know how lucky I was.

Clarence liked to play a game that seems to be a favorite with most composers. As far as I can figure out, its name must be “And then I wrote . . .” because it always starts with the composer playing an arpeggio, smiling at whoever is listening, and saying, “And then I wrote . . .” and going into a tune. A lot of them were pretty familiar tunes, but some were real rarities, and there were a couple that I kept in my repertoire from then on. I also heard a lot of stories, gossip, and musician talk. At the time, I found some of it pretty shocking, because these musicians were the creators and inventors of the music I loved, and it turned out that quite often they were cantankerous old curmudgeons who hated each other’s guts. For example, if you got Clarence Williams onto the subject of Jelly Roll Morton, his reaction
would be something like “That plagiarist!? That thief!?” He would become apoplectic. So you learned not to mention Jelly Roll Morton around Clarence Williams. I am told that Duke Ellington felt the same way about Morton. I do not know what Morton had to say about Clarence—to my eternal regret, Morton died before I could get my hands on him—but I do know what he had to say about W. C. Handy, the man who wrote “St. Louis Blues,” “Memphis Blues,” and a bunch of other hits. What he said was “Well, yes, there was a lot of unprotected material around in those days . . . ”