Dave Van Ronk

“Every corpse is a patriot.”

— Dave Van Ronk

“If it can't be done in bed, it's not worth doing.”

— Dave Van Ronk

I'm a very, very stubborn man.

— Dave Van Ronk

“Why must the show go on?”

— Dave Van Ronk

When you're working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.

— Dave Van Ronk

Most blues don't have a beginning, middle, or end. You just cut a couple slices of blues.

— Dave Van Ronk

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

— Dave Van Ronk

I'm an exhibitionist, I was an exhibitionist as a kid.

— Dave Van Ronk

By the mid-70s, I wanted to get out of the business. I was tired anyway.

— Dave Van Ronk

I think I have more in common with a carpenter than you might think. We're putting things together.

— Dave Van Ronk

“You can be a mighty sailor, wrestling with an alligator. Romping through the swamp.”

— Dave Van Ronk

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

— Dave Van Ronk

In the early 1970s. 1971, '72. The rooms were closing down, record labels weren't signing acoustic acts any more. Although they had…

— Dave Van Ronk

“March 1958 issue, for example, notes that “Dave Van Ronk, like so many other Village characters, has affected a beard.”

— Dave Van Ronk

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

— Dave Van Ronk

Ian and Sylvia, who, when you got right down to it, were essentially country and western singers. I just recorded his Four…

— Dave Van Ronk

Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone -…

— Dave Van Ronk

You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your…

— Dave Van Ronk

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills…

— Dave Van Ronk

And then adds with a laugh, 'but in retrospect I think he may have been more sophisticated than we were.'

— Dave Van Ronk

One of my earliest memories... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years…

— Dave Van Ronk

They basically said that if I didn't show up for school they'd mark me present, they wouldn't send the truant officer after…

— Dave Van Ronk

If there was ever any truth to the trickle-down theory, the only evidence of it I've ever seen was in that period…

— Dave Van Ronk

Sometimes you have to forget your principles and do what’s right.

— Dave Van Ronk

God has a way of telling you when to change your strings.

— Dave Van Ronk

I don't think I went a year or so without a record between 1959 and 1979, sometimes two.

— Dave Van Ronk

If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this…

— Dave Van Ronk

There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they…

— Dave Van Ronk

If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated,…

— Dave Van Ronk