Am I too old for my life to change or be changed? Possibly, though one has to live in hope. Earlier this year I spent some time in the US, mainly in New York, St Louis and Chicago. I’d planned to spend a week in New York, but thanks to storms in the midwest it turned into 10 days, and I ended up hanging out in Greenwich Village, playing chess in Washington Square and making like it was 1963, drinking coffees in cafés, all of which claimed to have been regular haunts of Bob Dylan.

I had always been a Dylan obsessive – I saw him first at Earls Court in 1978, I have all the albums, I’m saving up to buy the new six-volume Basement Tapes. Dylan was a given – always there, always will be. But the real discovery of my New York trip was Dave Van Ronk.

But not in the sense that I didn’t know who Van Ronk was. I knew he was one of Dylan’s mentors, and had heard his mildly embittered accusation that Dylan – the great magpie who never forgets a tune – stole his arrangement of The House of the Rising Sun. But I’d never really engaged with Van Ronk. Now, for the first time, I saw the places he played, read his wonderful memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, which is a brilliant account of the New York of the 1950s and early 60s, and started to listen to his music.

My trip coincided with the Coen Brothers’ fine, flawed film Inside Llewyn Davis, and probably with something of a midlife crisis too. The music and that era when anything seemed possible spoke to me powerfully, and one song in particular came to obsess me – Van Ronk’s interpretation of St James Infirmary, or the St James Infirmary Blues, to give this classic piece of Americana its proper title.

Van Ronk’s guitar introduction is a thing of wonder, and his delivery is raw, committed, powerful – all the things his fans came to expect over his uncompromising 50-year career. I loved the song and what Van Ronk stood for, and wanted to believe downtown New York still had some of that spirit and wasn’t just an expensive hangout for investment bankers and media executives: a tourist recreation of the visceral, late-50s reality.

When I got back to the UK, I sought out all the recordings of St James Infirmary I could find, and to my surprise unearthed one that was even more powerful than Van Ronk’s. James Booker had lived the sort of life depicted in the song, and found astonishing depths and a desperate poetry in it.

I also discovered that this blues standard was derived from an 18th-century English folk song called The Unfortunate Rake about a soldier (or maybe sailor) who is dying of venereal disease. The blues version changes the story, but not the mood. The teller of the tale knows he is doomed but shows no self-pity: “I want six crapshooters to be my pallbearers / Three pretty women to sing a song / Stick a jazz band on my hearse wagon / Raise hell as I stroll along.”

What other attitude to life could one have? It is how Van Ronk, increasingly marginalised as folk gave way to pop, lived his life, and how Booker dealt with his misfortunes, producing great music in the face of everything. As for the Village, it hasn’t seen the last of me, and those shiny new colonisers had better beware.