In 1953, at age 17, Dave Van Ronk was already living in Manhattan fulltime, learning jazz guitar. He hoped to make a living as a jazz musician, but the Beat Generation was winding down and the newcomers were flocking to Greenwich Village to be part of the resurgence of folk music – “The Great Folk Scare" as Utah Philips called it.

So Van Ronk was there before the beginning. He recounts the blending of jazz and older folk styles, tracing the history of blues to folk.

"The joke in the early 1960s was that I was the only folksinger in New York who knew how to play a diminished chord, and while that we not quite true, it does indicate what set me apart from a lot of the other people."

Reading this is like spending a day in Dave's living room, starting early with coffee and ending with a bottle late at night. Maybe you crash on his couch and continue the saga in the morning. You want to find the old music and listen again. It makes you nostalgic, even if you were never there.

The folk revival was reactionary to the pop music of the ‘50s. The new rise of pop in the ‘60s (The Beatles, etc.) lessened the influence of folk.