41 Quotes by Dave Van Ronk

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.

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’m an exhibitionist, I was an exhibitionist as a kid.

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.

If there was ever any truth to the trickle-down theory, the only evidence of it I’ve ever seen was in that period of 1960 to 1965. All of sudden they were handing out major label recording contracts like they were coming in Cracker Jack boxes.

Most blues don’t have a beginning, middle, or end. You just cut a couple slices of blues.

Blues is like a kielbasa, those long Polish sausages: you don’t sing a whole blues, you just cut off a section.

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.

In the early 1970s. 1971, ’72. The rooms were closing down, record labels weren’t signing acoustic acts any more. Although they had been pretty much been getting out of that for some time before that.