Week 45: Sunday Street



Dave Van Ronk

The Man

Dave van Ronk was a legendary figure in the Greenwich Village folk scene from the late 1950’s until his death in 2002. His is often cited by a major influence by leading folk artists such as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell but is largely unknown among the general public.

A native of New York, Dave was born David Kenneth Ritz Van Ronk in Brooklyn on June 30, 1936. His family moved to Queens when he was a child. He developed a love of music early on, especially jazz, and started on the banjo as a teenager. He was singing in a barber shop quartet by the age of 13 and was showing a real proficiency with music, adapted to any instrument he could get his hands on. He was a bright and self-motivated child and quickly worked out that he could learn more on his own than he could at school, dropping out at the age of 15. By this stage he was already living in the Village, and was growing into a huge man – already over 6 feet as a teen, he would end up around 6’5″.

After leaving school, Dave hung around the jazz clubs in Manhattan, trying to make it as a jazz musician, but without much success. He signed on with the merchant navy and shipped out on two voyages in the mid 1950’s. On his return, he discovered that the New York folk scene that had started in the 40’s with Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Lead Belly had started to evolve, adopting elements of beatnik culture and gaining a growing audience in the so called “coffee shop circuit”. He had grown increasingly interested in the blues and blues guitar, having picked up records by Furry Lewis and Mississippi John Hurt while buying jazz 78’s. He quickly discovered he could get regular gigs in the coffee houses finger picking the blues and singing with his deep, gravelly voice.

By 1958 he was already well known as a Greenwich Village icon, his imposing frame, idiosyncratic lyrics and singing, combined with his sheer talent on the guitar made him a very popular artist for both fans and fellow musicians alike. He was first recorded in 1958, playing guitar with “The Orange Blossom Jug Band” on an album of skiffle music, and the following year recorded his debut solo album titled “Van Ronk Sings Ballads, Blues, and a Spiritual”, released on Folkways records. The same year he also appeared on a release recorded by the folklorist Paul Clayton, and one of his blues tracks, Gambler’s Blues, was included on a compilation of songs inspired by the 18th century English folk tune “The Unfortunate Rake”.

His interest in blues guitar was growing and his discover of Rev Gary Davis only fuelled his creativity. His guitar technique gain more sophistication as he took Davis’s style of using the guitar like a piano and combined it with the complex jazz piano he favoured of Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington. In 1961 he recorded his second album, “Van Ronk Sings”, which was predominantly blues based featuring songs by Blind Lemon Jefferson, John Hurt, Gary Davis and Muddy Waters. He was approached by producer Albert Grossman, who auditioned him to join a folk trio he was forming, but his style was deemed too idiosyncratic, and he was passed by. That trio became Peter, Paul and Mary – their debut album was a massive success and who won a Grammy in 1963 for best folk recording.

1961 also saw the arrival in New York of a kid from Minnesota calling himself Bob Dylan. He quickly fell under Van Ronk’s wing, they became great friends, musical partners and in Dave the young Bob found a mentor and tutor on the guitar. The pair gigged together regularly around the coffee house scene, and Bob would sleep at Dave’s house. Dylan’s first album featured an arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun” created by Dave. The British Band “The Animals” would have a world wide hit with their version of this arrangement.

Dave released another 7 albums in the 60’s, and guested on a lot more, and although they were well received, none of them were commercially successful. He continued to gig around New York and became a proper music teacher, mentoring various folk and blues players like Christine Lavin, Danny Kalb and the Roche sisters. He was increasingly viewed as the unofficial head of the Greenwich music scene and remained friends with the big names in folk – Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Phil Ochs. He was dubbed “The Mayor of McDougal Street”, after the main street in the Village, and was very prominent in the social and political movements centred in New York. In 1969 he was arrested as part of the infamous raid on a gay bar, known as the Stonewall Riots, that a catalyst for the fight for recognition of gay and lesbian rights in the US.

Dave’s output slowed after the 60’s, releasing 3 albums in the 70s and 2 in the 80’s, but he remained a performed all his life. In total he released 22 solo albums over 5 decades, 8 live albums and numerous appearances on other artist’s records. He remained the key figure in the Village and was a walking history of life in New York and the blues tradition.

Dave was working his memoirs when he died of complications relating to colon cancer on February 10, 2002. Those memoirs were published as “The Mayor of McDougal Street” in 2005, which in turn formed the basis of the 2013 film “Inside Llewellyn Davis” directed by the Cohen brothers. Although the story depicted in the film is fictional, it broadly follows Van Ronk’s life and the main character is heavily based on Van Ronk.

In 2004 the city of New York renamed a section of a street “Dave Van Ronk Street” as tribute to the influence and legacy of the man who defines the Greenwich Village music scene.



The Song

Sunday Street is a standard 12 bar in E. It is played with the rather unorthodox combination of dropped D tuning (tune your low E down to D) with a capo on the 2nd fret.The song features Dave’s quite elaborate and inventive finger picking technique, with a bouncing main rhythm and fluid, lyrical solos between each verse.

Dave’s playing – like most great finger style guitarists – is based around chord shapes: A D shape for the main E chord, and E shaped barre chords for the B and A chords (albeit it with the bass note two frets higher to cater for the dropped E string). Dave incorporates a lot of ringing open strings in his playing, a trick he probably got from the Rev. Gary Davis,´.

The song is quick, the finger picking is very, very fluid and accurate, and it is played in positions that are somewhat unusual. There are a lot of notes that Dave plays very quietly that add the the harmonic backdrop of the notes he plays with volume. It is played with a great sense of dynamics.

As always, start off slow, try and get the groove happening then slowly increase speed.



The Lyrics

E Not a dollar, not a nickel, not a penny to my name I'm the king of tap city and I'm out of the game A A nickel up, a nickel down, another nickel gone Ain't got a nickel just to carry me on. B A When I'm back on my feet I'll move from Saturday Alley up to Sunday Street Gonna get a pair of dice that give me sevens all the time I'm gonna be living on chicken and wine Caviar four star, Johnny Walker Black Six pretty women in my gold Cadillac Move where the living is sweet from Saturday Alley up to Sunday Street Well my hands are shaking and I ain't feeling well from drinking King Kong liquor and cheap muscatel But a little taste of bourbon and breakfast in bed and six million dollars would raise the dead Just me and the other elite raising high class hell on Sunday Street Everybody says I'm talking out of my head but nobody bad mouths the man with the bread. All the whores are gonna drop their drawers and say "There goes the man who mugged Santa Claus," It pays to be discreet when you're talking to the King of Sunday Street. Not a dollar, not a nickel, not a penny to my name I'm the king of tap city and I'm out of the game A nickel up, a nickel down, another nickel gone Ain't got a nickel just to carry me on. When I'm back on my feet I'll move from Saturday Alley up to Sunday Street

The Intro



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The Progression



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$6.0.$2.3 $4.4 $3.2 $6.0.$2.3 $4.0.$3.2/.$2.3/ | Dave improvises around this basic progression in every verse.Last bar of Verse 3, leading into the third solo, slide a D shape up:

The First Solo



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The Second Solo



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The Third Solo



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Dave slides D shaped chords on the 2nd up into A shaped chords on the 7th fret. It sounds like he only strums it once, but it might be a good idea to strum the A shape on beat 1 to get that clear sound.The fourth solo follows the same shapes as the third, then leads into one more progression and into the outro.

The Outro