Inside Caffe Lena

Whether you like Inside Llewyn Davis or not, the film is inspiring yet another folk revival with a number of odd combinations like Norah Jones and Billie Joe Armstrong (of Green Day), who take the Everly Brothers' Songs Our Daddys Taught Us as a departure point for Foreverly. But, much more important are two great projects that bring Caffe Lena and Washington Square back into the fore.

Lena Spencer with John Hartford, 1989

Caffe Lena has been doing "good folk since 1960" and has hosted every folk musician of note over its 50+ year history. Lena herself passed away some years back, but the cafe kept going, and remains an unpretentious fixture in Saratoga Springs, New York. A beautifully illustrated book and CD box set paint a broad picture of the famous coffee house.

Van Ronk, Dylan and Suze Rotolo

The other collection is of the Mayor himself, ostensibly the subject of the Cohen brothers film, Dave Van Ronk. This is a box set compiled by Smithsonian Folkways that not includes many of his early recordings, but those recorded shortly before his death in 2002. Van Ronk became quickly overshadowed by Bob Dylan, but many credit him for opening the door for Bob in Greenwich Village all those years ago. The film was largely inspired by the memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, edited by Elijah Wood.

Photo Credits: Caffe Lena, Nippertown! and American Songwriter

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Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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