Book review: The New York neighbourhood that changed the music world

David Browne thoroughly examines all that happened in the artistic scene of Greenwich Village over the course of close to five decades  with a heavy focus on the tumultuous ’60s.

Folk musicians in Washington Square Park in New York may have been what originally drew people to the legendary Greenwich Village music scene in 1960s.

• Talkin' Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital 
• David Browne 
• Hachette, €40.60

How does an artistic “scene” come about? What factors need to coalesce? What turns a spark into a long-lasting flame?

When it came to the legendary Greenwich Village music scene in 1960s New York, a lot seemed to hinge on a singular, magnetising place and event: the outdoor jams held every Sunday in summer in Washington Square Park.

These happenings drew towards them, from far and wide, from the various crannies where they had been hiding, all those with a secret and unusual passion for folk music. 

The sessions formed what someone called “the incubation ground for the revival of folk singing”.

It was a case of come one, come all: Arlo Guthrie, who would have been around 10 years old, was dropped off by his mother Marjorie to wander around with his guitar until he found a group he could join in with.

From here sprang friendships, encouragement, collaborations, and perhaps the most precious commodity of all: momentum. 

All would be tested — though ultimately strengthened — by run-ins with the police and the city authorities about timings, crowd size, and the proper filling out of permit applications. 

Indeed, the freedom to make music in the park would become the subject of a famously chaotic riot in 1961.

David Browne thoroughly examines those early outdoor sessions as well all that happened indoors in countless coffee houses, music stores, apartments and sundry dives over the course of close to five decades — from 1957 to 2004 — with a heavy focus on the tumultuous ’60s. 

As a result, Talkin’ Greenwich Village is the kind of book you hope to walk away from with illuminating anecdotes and factoids to entertain and illuminate your friends. It doesn’t disappoint.

For instance, I hadn’t known that Strange Fruit, which was debuted by Billie Holiday in a Greenwich Village club in 1939, was written by a Jewish teacher from the Bronx called Abel Meeropel.

(A whole book could be written about the enormous Jewish contribution to the Village scene, whether in the form of artists, enthusiasts, or impresarios.) 

Later, we read about a duo called Kane and Carr, opening for Tom Ashley and the Irish Ramblers at Folk City in 1963. 

They had previously had a hit called Hey, Schoolgirl, using the moniker Tom and Jerry, but eventually found fame under their true names: Simon and Garfunkel.

In a book like this, one also hopes to meet some memorable characters. They turn up in their droves. 

There is Israel Young, for example, a pre-med student who ended up ditching that career after he was introduced to square dancing by a friend at his college astronomy club. 

“Izzy” went on to set up the Folklore Center, an eccentric Village institution selling books and sheet music. About square dancing, he once said: 

“It would be like, you know, masturbation. After you do it, you say you’ll never do it again, and then another”.

David Browne, a senior writer at ‘Rolling Stone’ and the author of several music biographies.

The Clancy brothers and Tommy Makem, meanwhile, make an entrance on page 42. 

And, again, I learn things I should have known but didn’t; that Paddy and Tom both served in the RAF during the Second World War, for instance, or that music was originally intended as a means of raising money to pursue their first passion, acting. 

Hearing them sing became a rite of passage for American “folkniks” who occupied the Village alongside the beatniks (and the “stareniks” who came to gawp at the beatniks).

Jazz, though, was still the dominant Village musical genre in the late ’50s and remained a big part of the delights on offer. 

In the summer of 1965 alone, Charlie Mingus, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins, and many others were all to be heard live somewhere in the area between, roughly speaking, Fourth Avenue and the Hudson (going east to west) and between Fourteenth Street and Houston (going north to south).

Bob Dylan edges his way into the story at the beginning of chapter three and Judy Collins’ reaction to hearing him for the first time is priceless:

“He was singing old Woody songs, and I thought, ‘Badly chosen and badly sung’. I was so bored.”

Tom Paxton said: “We were very friendly, but we didn’t get to know him. He was not to be known.” 

From the outset, some of Dylan’s songs didn’t quite fit the established, beloved paradigms, whether hillbilly laments, or noble protest songs, or something bluesy. 

Bob Dylan performs at The Bitter End folk club in Greenwich Village in 1961 in New York City. File picture: Sigmund Goode/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images

Indeed, the early covers of Blowin’ in the Wind seem to show other Village musicians trying to drag Dylan’s classic back into more familiar shapes. 

And whereas experiments when they came — the transition to electric instruments, for instance — were usually the production of conscious deliberation under the influence of external pressures — “The Beatles scuttled all of us,” said Sylvia Tyson — Dylan was perhaps always running off internal, invisible, idiosyncratic forces, entirely his own.

It was a scene riven with contradictions. The folkies themselves were swarming over someone else’s neighbourhood: in the case of Greenwich Village, Italian Americans.

“It was an Italian neighbourhood,” said Terri Thal. “People lived there. And we came in, and we destroyed it, and they hated us.” 

By the mid-60s, when folk was taking its strong pop and rock turn, there were crowds, crime, drugs, knives, guns. No wonder the locals were upset. The people’s music didn’t always turn out good for, well, the people.

Paradoxes multiplied. Rootless urban drifters singing roots music. Artists who couldn’t hold down a job, sticking up for the working man. Sizeable egos singing about self-sacrifice and humility.

Experimenters messing with tradition, decrying capitalism while chasing record contracts, singing of austerity, penury, and starvation and hard times, but with cash to blow on drugs and booze.

These tensions largely remain between the lines of Talkin’ Greenwich Village, with the author preferring to tell a fascinating story in a fairly celebratory fashion, rather than detour too far into analysis. 

By 1967, the original Village folk scene was running out of steam and talent with many of the best-known names heading for other parts of Manhattan — “loft jazz” in The Bowery, anyone? — bigger venues, the West coast, or even Europe — as well as heading, musically speaking, for the more lucrative and fashionable fields of rock and pop. 

As a larger-than-life Village legend who stayed at his post right to the end — he died in 2002 — Dave Van Ronk, the Mayor of McDougall Street himself, acts as a kind of fulcrum for the whole story Browne is attempting to tell. 

Van Ronk’s durability meant that, though not homosexual himself, he was around to get caught up in, and arrested during, the 1969 Stonewall Riots.

On the story wends, from the likes of Loudon Wainwright III (Van Ronk tells him Plane Too was either the best song he’d ever heard or the worst) through to Suzanne Vega. 

By the end, the Village is more of a “musical ghost town”, its spirits fled to a thousand different places and the same number of different fates. 

David Browne is a genial storyteller who wears his immense knowledge lightly. 

If he were a folk singer, he’d be the type who performs in the service of the song, not himself, which helps to make Talkin’ Greenwich Village a very fine read indeed.