I like Dave Van Ronk. I have forever. Still, the book took me forever to read. Not because I didn’t enjoy it, I very much did, but because, as always, Dave Van Ronk is surprising.

I wasn’t expecting a chapter devoted to anarchy, activism, or the confiscation  of the term and re-appropriation of libertarian-ism quite so early on. This was stupid of me. I know who Dave Van Ronk is, after all. And I know he had things to say.

My favorite answer to that question is: Dave Van Ronk was a folk singer who was out to dinner the night of the Stonewall Riots, saw people throwing bricks and heard the commotion, and excused himself from the table to join. Famously quoted, “…I figured, they can’t have a riot without me!”

If for whatever reason you doubt Van Ronk’s intelligence, you needn’t. Everything discussed shows a highly intelligent, curious, thoughtful man who carefully plodded through his politics and his craft. These are perhaps his two most comfortable topics. He, like so many men laboring against patriarchy long before it was popular or even a term, runs into that barrier of having to define what patriarchy is without many allies. He knows that there is injustice, that he seems to be somehow benefit from the status quo, yet he wants to raise up the others around him. He believed in true equality —which is goddamn hard when you’re getting started in the 1950s as if it isn’t still hard today.

There’s a cancer of hyper individualism that sees people with amazing work lives or intellectual lives who have very turbulent personal lives. Van Ronk is one of them, a proud race of people trying to navigate the society he’s in and the values he has.

Also, his descriptions of music and honing his skill leaves me jealous. He was someone who put his head down and learned, meticulously, leaning heavily on the influences around him to be a school and not something he merely took from.