Dave Van Ronk Quotes
Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.
Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.
If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.
I think I have more in common with a carpenter than you might think. We're putting things together.
You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.
I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.
There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians.
If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not going to be as good as doing the same piece in front of an audience.
If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.
And then adds with a laugh, 'but in retrospect I think he may have been more sophisticated than we were.'
Ian and Sylvia, who, when you got right down to it, were essentially country and western singers. I just recorded his Four Strong Winds. It's a wonderful song.
I don't think I went a year or so without a record between 1959 and 1979, sometimes two.
Most blues don't have a beginning, middle, or end. You just cut a couple slices of blues.
