TALKIN' GREENWICH VILLAGE

Reviving New York’s spirited music scene.

Browne, a senior writer at Rolling Stone and biographer of many music notables, including Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, draws on a wealth of interviews and archival sources to create a teeming history of Greenwich Village from 1957 to the 1980s. By the late 1950s, venues like the Village Vanguard, Cafe Bohemia, the Five Spot, and the Half Note already were famous for jazz, while folk singers drew crowds in Washington Square Park. Soon, Odetta and Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, and Judy Collins, among many others, took the stage in coffeehouses and clubs, drawing throngs of fans. On a snowy night in 1961, a “funny, fumbling, somewhat chubby kid” who called himself Bob Dylan appeared at Cafe Wha?, one of many young upstarts hoping to make a name for himself in New York. “As disparate as the talent in the Village was—oceans of difference between Van Ronk’s gruffness, Dylan’s bristling wheeze, Collins’s purity, and Paxton’s smoothness, to cite a few—one thing bound them together,” Browne writes. “Theirs was music neither as stuffy nor as straitlaced as that of the balladeers who’d preceded them” on those same stages. Dylan was especially influential, with original compositions that inspired others to write their own pieces rather than rework traditional songs. Browne recounts the genesis of groups (Peter, Paul, and Mary; the Roche sisters); the agents who managed them; and the rivalries, love affairs, and musical hits that transformed their careers—in turn, transforming the Village. He recounts, as well, the “wall of segregation” that kept folk music largely white and the government surveillance that threatened the community. Steeped in music culture and lore, Browne offers a detailed, abundantly populated chronicle of a storied place and its creative, outspoken, driven inhabitants.

Animated social history.