Last night I was listening to the Oregon Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Eroica symphony (written in 1804) and I couldn’t help thinking about what an amazing time that was. In 1804 Lewis and Clark had made it all the way up the Missouri into Indian country. No one back in Washington knew if they were even alive. Simon Willard was busy in Boston foreshadowing the industrial revolution by producing the first Banjo clocks, (the only clock invented entirely by an American). At the same moment in Europe Napoleon was crowned emperor of France which prompted Beethoven to rename his symphony from the "Bonaparte" to the "Eroica" in memory of someone who he thought was a great man of the people who had betrayed the French revolution by crowning himself emperor (in Beethoven’s mind a tyrant to be). That symphony was said to be the greatest single step made by a composer in musical history, leaping from the 18th century to the nineteenth, from the classical period to the romantic all in one giant step. After nearly 200 years that music can still jump out of the 18th into the 21st century and move us to tears.

Last month on Feb 10, 2002 Dave Van Ronk died of complications from colon cancer treatment. It was an irreplaceable loss for many of us who knew him and loved his music. In his life of 65 and a half years he too had made a giant step by moving honest and simple American folk music to new heights of character and passion. He did it with the help of his old Guild (Made in New Jersey) acoustic guitar and his raspy asthma stifled voice.

I feel like I’ve been telling this story for a century but actually it’s only been less than half a century (40 years) since Phil Ochs introduced me to Dave Van Ronk by bringing Dave’s Folksinger record into my house one morning in June of 1962. Since Phil suffered even then from over exuberance, I was a little reluctant but went ahead and played the first band and listened to "He was a friend of Mine". That was it. I was sold. My progress in the music world was frozen right there in time. I’m still there. After that Phil brought me records by Bob Gibson. . . "too folksy" I said. . . then Bob Dylan. . . "eh he’s a little nasal" I said. "But that Van Ronk guy, he’s terrific. Way better than those other guys. He’s going to be famous". .. Er.... I still think I’m right. Dave has been a hero to me ever since.

During the early 60’s when the folk music era was in its heyday, many people came to Greenwich Village, quickly rose to stardom, and then lost track of their friends along the way. Dave, although an incurable skeptic and always an iconoclast, never forgot a friend. He generously mentored many of those early stars and watched them soar. But he was always there for them when they returned to earth. One of them was Phil Ochs who Dave looked after and encouraged from the time he got to Greenwich Village in 1962 until he committed suicide in 1976. Way back 40 years ago I used to hang out in the village at Phil’s place whenever I could and I remember first hand how much Dave meant to Phil. He was a mentor, a colleague, and an inspiration to Phil and he never let him down. Dave was the last friend to take Phil in and give him a place to crash when he was disorganized, depressed, and dangerously suicidal. But he was a friend and that’s what you do for your friends. We made him an "honorary psychiatrist" to some extent on account of that and there is no doubt in my mind that he was far more important to Phil at that time than any official psychiatrist could have been. I think this is the underlying shared human experience that made him seem so much like one of us "community psychiatrists".

He did receive an ASCAP Lifetime Achievement Award a few years ago so it is not as if he wasn’t noticed but there is more to this story than the music. Dave was a man who came to understand humanity both through his music and his life experience. He had tried being a sailor in his youth but his bad lungs made that a little too risky as a life’s career. Later hanging around Harlem clubs in order to hear Billie Holiday and then singing in places like "Mitchel’s Cafe"( "Leave your wife and bring your knife") {otherwise known as the Gaslight in Greenwich Village} or Duffy’s Pub in Portland Oregon, or the Troubadour in LA. Dave learned about life’s tragedies and triumphs from a face-to-face perspective. Dave was also a blue collar guitar teacher. A lot of very ordinary people like me either stole or took lessons from him. Truthfully, although it matters little in the greater scheme of things, most of what I do musically I owe to him. I will continue to shamelessly struggle to learn and play his ingenious guitar licks as will thousands of others.

Like Beethoven, van Ronk started with a sort of classical form and moved into something more powerful. Like Beethoven, he saw rising stars around him but he also never lost sight of the people. Van Ronk took the music of the people sung in the cities, and in the fields and nursed them into works of technical genius and emotional depth. He absorbed, arranged, and preserved some of the greatest honest American music ever not written down, such as the works of some incredible old blind black men like Gary Davis, Brownie McGee, and Willie McTell, not to mention Mississippi John Hurt. No one has ever come close to the depth of character he brought to this music which will insure that as long as there are people alive to listen to traditional music there will be something very special to hear. He was a man of absolute principle regarding the roots and culture of music combined with a total disregard of the concrete and material stuff most of us are so addicted to. He once started a rock and roll band (The Hudson Dusters) but soon quit his own band because he was so bored playing that stuff over and over. Basically he would have rather gone hungry than do something inauthentic for him. Jazz, blues, folk, that’s real for him, the rest he would say "is a bunch of crap".

Dave and I had become pretty good friends over the past several years. I think our commonality has to do with both of us spending a lot of teenage time in pool halls instead of in high school and also me working in a brewery and driving a taxi in my youth while he was a seaman. We both failed at blue collar work but managed to make a living entertaining people. We in the AACP were exceptionally lucky to have had the opportunity to hear Dave and Odetta down in New Orleans at the IPS and then in Phili again at IPS when he did a workshop on blues and depression He was truly a colleague to all of us and I know everyone appreciated his efforts. We will all miss him.