THE READING ROOM: New Greenwich Village Book Spotlights 1950s-’00s

Walk along most streets in Greenwich Village these days, and you’re more likely to see banks, high-end clothing shops, and upscale restaurants than small clubs full of folk singers or jazz musicians. In the late 1950s through the late 1980s, though, the scene would have looked and sounded very different. During those years, the sole reason you likely were in the Village in the first place was to see and hear Dave Van Ronk or Judy Collins or Peter, Paul, and Mary, or the Kingston Trio, or Bob Dylan, or the Roches, or Steve Forbert. Still, as David Browne points out in his colorful and exquisitely detailed new book, Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital (Hachette, September 17, 2024), the Village wasn’t ever one scene but many diverse scenes, each containing the seeds of its demise and rebirth. In those years, it evolved from an acoustic folkie conclave to an electric folk-rock launching pad.

In many ways, Browne, senior writer at Rolling Stone and author of biographies of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and James Taylor, among others, was destined to write this definitive history of the Village.

Growing up in northern New Jersey, he said in a recent interview, “we could see the skyline of New York City from our backyard. I’d take the bus into the city to look through the used record stores in the Village.”

In 1978, on his first night as a freshman at NYU, Browne and his roommates decided to take a walk around the Village. Even though he “sensed that the heyday of the Village music world had peaked,” as he writes in his book, “music clearly remained woven into the fabric of the neighborhood, even if the material was frayed.” While music from the Bottom Line, Folk City, the Bitter End, and the Village Vanguard still drifted out into the streets, a new club, Kenny’s Castaways, had opened. In our conversation, Browne recalled rushing out every Wednesday morning to buy a copy of the Village Voice — the day the venerable paper was published — and scan the listing of clubs to see who was performing. In 1978, he heard a new generation of songwriters in the clubs — Shawn Colvin, Suzanne Vega, Steve Forbert, and others — who were carrying on the folk tradition but shaping it in their own ways.

For a class in magazine journalism, Browne wrote a story on the Village folk revival of the time. “A new club, the Speakeasy, had just opened, and at Folk City, I heard Suzanne Vega and many of the newer songwriters,” he told me.

In addition to his own long history with the Village — he remained there for almost twenty years following his graduation from NYU—Browne says neighborhood’s present day prompted him to write Talkin’ Greenwich Village. “In 2019, I did a walking tour of the Village with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who still remembers where certain clubs used to be, and realized how much wasn’t there anymore,” he says.

Then, in 2020, Browne wrote a profile of the late David Blue, another denizen of the early years of the Village. Working on that story brought to mind all the musicians who had passed through the scene over the years, helping to define and shape it. The pandemic threatened to shut down the whole place. “No one had done a book tracing the arc of the Village,” he told me. “So I wanted to trace the arc of the narrative in my book.”

In Talkin’ Greenwich Village, he writes that, now, one has the “sense of a music community that was, at best, off life support. The action was now in Brooklyn or other parts of town. What happened? Why had such a vibrant and vital music center been reduced to this? The time to tell the story had arrived, at least for me.”

In chapters titled after songs, Browne offers a sprawling, yet intimate, history of the Village and its inhabitants from 1957 to 2004. His questions about the current state and future of the Village bring us to the present day. Dave Van Ronk, the Mayor of MacDougal Street and, in Browne’s words, “that bear-like titan of Village vernacular music,” stands as a bookend to this narrative. “Van Ronk was the foundation of the scene,” Browne told me. “He mentored so many people. He taught guitar to some of them, helped many in other ways. His story parallels the Village’s.”

Browne chronicles the events and people that shaped the Village during these years — the basket-clubs, the jazz clubs, the “beatnik riot” in Washington Square Park, the Sunday music circles in Washington Square Park, the policing of the clubs, the racial tensions boiling in the neighborhood. In our conversation, he mentioned four phases of the neighborhood: “There’s the beginning of the scene in the late ‘50s and into the early ‘60s. … Van Ronk embodies that era. In the second period, in the mid-‘60s, the Village goes electric. The folk thing is sort of exhausted, but [the] musicians … electrify the scene. During this period, the Village grows less insular and huge waves of tourists come to the scene. Then, there’s the burnout period of the late ‘60s through the mid-‘70s. Even though songwriters are still gravitating toward the Village, folk music had moved to other places, like California. Clubs were starting to close. It was a fallow period. Finally, there’s the rebirth of the Village in the late 1970s and mid-‘80s.”

“I didn’t want this just to be chronicle of all the club owners and who opened which club when or of all the musicians who ever played in the Village,” Browne added. “I was inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. I love the great way she humanized that epic of Black migration from the South. I wanted to put a human face on the scene in the Village.”

There are several themes Browne says he’d like readers to absorb. “The scene was under so many watchful eyes for many decades,” he told me. “For decades, the Village was under siege. It was monitored by the neighborhood, by police, by the Mob, by the FBI. It’s amazing that it lasted as long as it did with these groups looking over its shoulder. [Readers] might be surprised to learn that playing folk music in Washington Square Park was not legal. Also, there’s the songwriting aspect. When Dylan started writing his own songs, and not playing or interpreting traditional old time songs, that changed the scene. … I hope readers will recognize that there was life after Dylan and life after the 1960s — so many amazing musicians came after.”

Talkin’ Greenwich Village brings to vivid life the history of the Village in its many phases. Reading Browne’s book is like walking through the streets of a familiar place, discovering newness around every corner.