He was the big fish in the small pond that was the Greenwich Village folk music scene circa 1960, sought out and emulated by newcomers like Bob Dylan and Tom Paxton. But by the time his memoir, “The Mayor of Macdougal Street,” was published posthumously in 2005, Dave Van Ronk had been relegated almost to a footnote in the history of American popular music, better known for the many singer-songwriters whose careers he had fostered than for his own work.

Now Van Ronk may finally be about to get his due. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the new Coen brothers movie opening on Friday, is based loosely, very loosely, on his memoir, which has just been reissued; in advance of the film, a three-CD Van Ronk retrospective called “Down in Washington Square,” with 16 previously unheard recordings, has already been released by Smithsonian Folkways. In connection with a new book and CD about the Caffè Lena folk club in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., one of Van Ronk’s 1974 shows there is being streamed, and a new documentary evoking the folk scene over which he presided, “Another Day/Another Time,” will be shown on Showtime on Dec. 13.

“Dave Van Ronk is not an obscure figure,” Ethan Coen said when asked about the origins of the film. “He’s the biggest figure on an obscure scene, playing a kind of niche music that we knew and liked. We gravitated to his book,” because “it is a great, and very funny, document of its time. His acid voice is part of what draws you into the book, which is the best thing I know of in giving a sense of what it was like to be a working musician at that time.”