INTRODUCTION

Elijah Wald

The Greenwich Village of Llewyn Davis is not the thriving folk scene that produced Peter, Paul and Mary and changed the world when Bob Dylan went electric. It is the folk scene in the dark ages before the hit records and big money arrived, when a small coterie of true believers traded old songs like a secret language. Most of them were kids who had grown up on the streets of New York or the prefab suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, trying to escape the dullness and conformity of the Eisenhower 1950s. Some were college students living at home with their parents, others shared apartments in what was still the old, immigrant New York of Little Italy and the Lower East Side, where a two-person hole-in-the-wall could be had for twenty-five or thirty dollars a month.

Some details of Llewyn seem like nods to familiar figures - his Welsh name recalls Dylan, and like Phil Ochs he crashes on the couch of a singing couple named Jim and Jean. But the film catches him in the moment before Dylan and Ochs arrived in New York, when no one could have imagined the Village scene becoming the center of a folk music boom that would produce international superstars and change the course of popular music. This moment of transition - before the arrival of the 60s as we know them - was captured by one of the central figures on that scene, Dave Van Ronk, in his memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, which the Coen Brothers mined for local color and a few scenes. Llewyn is not Van Ronk, but he sings some of Van Ronk's songs and shares his background as a working-class kid who split his life between music and occasional jobs as a merchant seaman.

Llewyn also shares Van Ronk's love and respect for authentic folk music, songs and styles created by working-class people and passed on from one artist to another, polished by the ebb and flow of oral tradition. For Van Ronk's generation, that well-worn authenticity provided a profound contrast to the ephemeral confections of the pop music world, and the choice to play folk music was almost like joining a religious order - complete with a vow of poverty, since there were virtually no jobs in New York for anyone who sounded like a traditional folk artist. That would change in the early 1960s, and already there were glimmerings of the world to come - a few small clubs where people could play once in a while for tips, and little record companies that might not pay anything but at least were willing to record the real stuff. With all its difficulties, Van Ronk recalled that time with deep affection - like Llewyn he was living hand-to-mouth and sleeping on couches, but for a while he was surrounded by people for whom the music mattered more than anything else.

The Village folk scene of the late 1950s has mostly been ignored or forgotten by later fans and historians, who tend to jump from Pete Seeger and his hits with the Weavers at the beginning of the decade to Dylan's arrival in 1961. By contrast, Van Ronk recalls this as a key period in which an intimate band of young musicians shaped a new approach to folksinging, studying old records to capture the grit and rawness of Delta blues and Appalachian ballads, then finding ways to make that music express their own feelings and desires. Most of these musicians did not go on to professional careers, or even make a record. (The Kossoy Sisters were among the few to be recorded, and their 1957 album was forgotten by all but the most ardent folk fans until the Coen Brothers used its version of "I'll Fly Away" to score part of their characters' odyssey through rural Mississippi in O Brother, Where Art Thou?) The Village scene of the late 1950s was a world of sincere, enthusiastic amateurs, ignored by the outside world but intensely dedicated and fired by youthful optimism. Van Ronk remembered, "We had no doubt that we were the cutting edge of the folk revival - but bear in mind, we were in our late teens and early twenties, and if you do not feel you are the cutting edge at that age, there is something wrong with you. Of course we were the wave of the future - we were twenty-one!"

Looking back from the twenty-first century, it can be hard to remember how different things were in the days before the constant barrage of mass media and instant communication, and the extent to which even bright young musicians in New York City could live in their own world. The center of the Village scene in those days was not a nightclub or coffeehouse, but Washington Square Park, where singers and musicians gathered to jam on Sunday afternoons. Van Ronk started showing up in the mid-1950s, and recalled that there would be six or seven groups playing at the same time, each with their own circle of friends and listeners. By the arch at the bottom of Fifth Avenue, a crowd of kids who had gotten into folk music at progressive summer camps and Labor Youth League get-togethers would be singing union songs they had picked up at Pete Seeger concerts or from Sing Out! magazine. Over by the Sullivan Street side of the square the young Zionist socialists of Hashomer Hatzair would be singing "Hava Nagila" and doing Israeli folk dances. Around the fountain, a banjo virtuoso named Roger Sprung led the first wave of urban bluegrass musicians, picking high-octane hoedowns and singing in nasal harmony.

Sprung was one of the few people on that scene who had any connection with the commercial music business: he had recorded four songs in the early 1950s with a group called the Folksay Trio, whose two other members shortly renamed themselves the Tarriers and got two top ten hits, "Cindy, Oh Cindy" and "The Banana Boat Song." A song the Tarriers recorded with Sprung, "Tom Dooley," was copied by a younger group called the Kingston Trio and topped the pop chart in 1958.

The Tarriers and Kingston Trio were part of a pop-folk trend that now tends to be remembered as hokey, lightweight silliness, and the Washington Square crowd helped shape our modern opinion. For most of the young musicians in the Village, it represented the bland conformity and commercial culture they hated and were trying to escape. As Van Ronk recalled, with typical vituperation, "We knew about the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte and their hordes of squeaky-clean imitators, but we felt like that was a different world that had nothing to do with us. Most of those people couldn't play worth a damn and were indifferent singers, and as far as material was concerned they were scraping the top of the barrel, singing songs that we had all learned and dropped already. It was Sing Along with Mitch and the Fireside Book of Folk Songs, performed by sophomores in paisley shirts, and it was a one hundred percent rip-off: they were ripping off the material, they were ripping off the authors, composers, collectors, and sources, and they were ripping off the public."

The pop folkies Van Ronk ridiculed might rule in suburbia and Midwestern college campuses, but they had little impact on what was heard or played in New York clubs, much less by the hardcore folkniks in Washington Square. No one on that scene remembers Roger Sprung for his near brush with the Top Forty. They remember him as an older musician who knew more than the rest of them about real Southern music, and was willing to teach anyone who cared about that style. He was in the Square every Sunday, accompanied by a fellow named Lionel Kilberg who played a home-made washtub bass, and they would have a cluster of younger players around them that over the years included pretty much all the musicians who went on to lead the urban old-time and bluegrass scenes of the 1960s. Kilberg was particularly important because he was also the person who went down to city hall each month and got the permit to play music in the Square. The permit allowed them to be there from one to five o'clock, and the permit-holder had to be physically present for the singing to be legal, so Kilberg was the one absolutely necessary participant.

Along with the folk dancers, the political singalong kids, and the bluegrassers, young soloists would sit on benches or around the fountain near the arch, playing guitars, banjos, or dulcimers and singing ballads and blues. If they were any good or had enough friends, they would be surrounded by small circles of listeners, and when someone learned a new song they would bring it down to the park and other people would pick it up. Van Ronk would normally be there singing blues, and the Kossoys, Paul Clayton, or the folklorist Roger Abrahams sang ballads from the British Isles or the Southern mountains. Sometimes an older, established performer like Oscar Brand or Theodore Bikel might show up, or someone might bring Woody Guthrie - he was already incapacitated by Huntington's Chorea and couldn't sing, but he would occasionally strum a few chords - or the Reverend Gary Davis, a Harlem street preacher and guitar virtuoso who was the main inspiration for a generation of young fingerpickers.

Van Ronk recalled that the ballad singers and blues people tended to hang with each other because there were not many of either, and they formed a sort of clique within the clique: "We banded together for mutual support, because we didn't make as much noise as the other groups, and we hated them all - the Zionists, the summer camp kids, and the bluegrassers - every last, dead one of them. Of course, we hated a lot of people in those days."

In hindsight, those ballad and blues singers were shaping a new aesthetic that would produce people like Dylan, Ochs, Joan...