Before Bob Dylan became a folk legend, he was just another young songwriter wandering into Greenwich Village’s coffeehouses, hoping to learn from the best. And in the early 1960s, “the best” wasn’t who most people today might guess — it was Dave Van Ronk, the man known around the neighborhood as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street.”
While Van Ronk didn’t chase fame, he influenced the sound of everyone who did, including Dylan.
His baritone voice, complex fingerpicking and extensive knowledge of traditional music set a high bar in the Village scene. While Dylan was still finding his footing, Van Ronk was already the respected mentor other musicians looked to for guidance.
Dylan never hid his admiration, noting in Chronicles Vol. 1, “He was passionate and stinging, sang like a soldier of fortune and sounded like he paid a high price. [He] could howl and whisper, turn blues into ballads and ballads into blues. He was what [Greenwich Village] was all about.”
For a newcomer just settling into New York, a performance that intense was impossible to shake.
He admitted as much, “I’d heard Van Ronk back in the Midwest on records and thought he was pretty great, copied some of his recordings phrase for phrase.”
And he wasn’t exaggerating. Alongside writing his own songs like “Bad Dream Blues” and “River Come Down,” Van Ronk also influenced one of Dylan’s earliest recordings.
Most people today know “House of the Rising Sun” through The Animals’ 1964 version, but the song has much older roots.
Before it became a rock classic, it lived in the acoustic folk circles, where both Dylan and Van Ronk performed it.
Dylan included the song on his 1962 debut album Bob Dylan. But, as shown in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentaryNo Direction Home, the arrangement Dylan used wasn’t his own — he used Van Ronk’s version.
When Dylan mentioned he planned to record the song, Van Ronk reportedly objected, as he had intended to record it himself. But the track had already been cut.
Van Ronk later said the most irritating part was that people started accusing him of stealing from Dylan. “That was very, very annoying,” Van Ronk admitted.
And then history looped again. Once The Animals recorded their iconic rock version (built off Dylan’s take, which was built off Van Rock’s) Dylan stopped performing the song because audiences began accusing him of copying The Animals.
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