Bob Dylan called him his first New York muse, yet Dave Van Ronk never gained the recognition he deserved. Inside Llewyn Davis draws on his story
Poor Dave Van Ronk. He was in the right place – the Greenwich Village coffee-house scene – at the right time, doing all the right things, singing the right songs to the right people. But he just didn't have the magic. And he didn't have the luck, either.
Sometime in the 1950s, when he was a young man trying to become a folk singer, he had learned a traditional song called "House of the Rising Sun" from a pre-war field recording on which it was sung without accompaniment by a Kentucky miner's teenage daughter. Van Ronk changed it around a bit, keeping the tune and most of the words, but adding a distinctive chord sequence that made an already plaintive lament even more arresting. As his reputation grew,...
Poor Dave Van Ronk. He was in the right place – the Greenwich Village coffee-house scene – at the right time, doing all the right things, singing the right songs to the right people. But he just didn't have the magic. And he didn't have the luck, either.
Sometime in the 1950s, when he was a young man trying to become a folk singer, he had learned a traditional song called "House of the Rising Sun" from a pre-war field recording on which it was sung without accompaniment by a Kentucky miner's teenage daughter. Van Ronk changed it around a bit, keeping the tune and most of the words, but adding a distinctive chord sequence that made an already plaintive lament even more arresting. As his reputation grew,...
- 1/11/2014
- by Richard Williams
- The Guardian - Film News
Take another look @ a restricted 'red-band' trailer, plus all the other clips of footage and featurettes released to date from the new movie "Inside Llewyn Davis", directed by Joel and Ethan Coen ("True Grit").
The new drama adapts "...the music, politics and spirit of a revolutionary period in American culture", based on the novel "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" by author Dave Van Ronk.
Cast includes Oscar Issac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake, Garret Hedlund and F. Murray Abraham :
"...'Dave Van Ronk', one of the founding figures of the 1960's folk revival, was far more than that. A pioneer of modern acoustic blues, a songwriter, arranger and singer, he became one of the most influential guitarists of that era.
"'This is a first-hand account by a major player including encounters with Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Joni Mitchell, as well as older luminaries including Reverend Gary Davis,...
The new drama adapts "...the music, politics and spirit of a revolutionary period in American culture", based on the novel "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" by author Dave Van Ronk.
Cast includes Oscar Issac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake, Garret Hedlund and F. Murray Abraham :
"...'Dave Van Ronk', one of the founding figures of the 1960's folk revival, was far more than that. A pioneer of modern acoustic blues, a songwriter, arranger and singer, he became one of the most influential guitarists of that era.
"'This is a first-hand account by a major player including encounters with Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Joni Mitchell, as well as older luminaries including Reverend Gary Davis,...
- 1/5/2014
- by Michael Stevens
- SneakPeek
Asia: XXX (Frontiers)
That title's not triple-x as in porn, it's Roman numerals marking this supergroup's thirtieth anniversary (though I bet the confusion will increase this page's hits). Yup, three decades ago, "Heat of the Moment" was a massive hit. However, critics have tended to dislike Asia, either for dealing in pop rather than the glorious prog-rock of its members' previous bands -- Yes, Elp, and King Crimson -- or (if said critics are on the other side of the great divide) as dinosaurs still too proggy for naysayers in the post-punk era. Not this critic, through; I have always enjoyed John Wetton's voice, layered vocal harmonies, and melodic sense in every context, and never found Geoff Downes's keyboards and catchy songwriting/production the sacrilege that purist proggers did.
While there are some slight production differences from thirty years ago, basically this third studio album since the original lineup (Wetton,...
That title's not triple-x as in porn, it's Roman numerals marking this supergroup's thirtieth anniversary (though I bet the confusion will increase this page's hits). Yup, three decades ago, "Heat of the Moment" was a massive hit. However, critics have tended to dislike Asia, either for dealing in pop rather than the glorious prog-rock of its members' previous bands -- Yes, Elp, and King Crimson -- or (if said critics are on the other side of the great divide) as dinosaurs still too proggy for naysayers in the post-punk era. Not this critic, through; I have always enjoyed John Wetton's voice, layered vocal harmonies, and melodic sense in every context, and never found Geoff Downes's keyboards and catchy songwriting/production the sacrilege that purist proggers did.
While there are some slight production differences from thirty years ago, basically this third studio album since the original lineup (Wetton,...
- 7/7/2012
- by SteveHoltje
- www.culturecatch.com
Like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Rev. Gary Davis, also known as Blind Gary Davis, played in the graceful Piedmont blues style of the southeastern U.S., rather than the rawer blues favored in the Mississippi Delta. Completely self-taught, Davis mastered a delicate and expressive fingerpicking style on the guitar, and played with such fluency that he never performed a song exactly the same way twice.accomplishing this despite a slightly maimed left hand which had been broken and badly set when he was young. “I don’t play the guitar,” he once said, “I play with the guitar.” Davis’ parents were both ill-suited to raising a child (“there was no confidence to be put into my mother,” Davis told his student Stefan Grossman in this short interview), and so he was brought up by his grandmother instead, growing up in rural South Carolina. He built his first...
- 9/18/2008
- avclub.com
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