Dave Van Ronk Quotes

25 quotes in 378 categories

• You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.
• Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.
• I'm a very, very stubborn man.
• My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
• God has a way of telling you when to change your strings.
• One of my earliest memories... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years old. And one…
• Most blues don't have a beginning, middle, or end. You just cut a couple slices of blues.
• Ian and Sylvia, who, when you got right down to it, were essentially country and western singers. I just recorded his Four Strong Winds. It's…
• In the early 1970s. 1971, '72. The rooms were closing down, record labels weren't signing acoustic acts any more. Although they had been pretty much…
• Sometimes you have to forget your principles and do what’s right.
• By the mid-70s, I wanted to get out of the business. I was tired anyway.
• I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.
• I don't think I went a year or so without a record between 1959 and 1979, sometimes two.
• I think I have more in common with a carpenter than you might think. We're putting things together.
• I'm an exhibitionist, I was an exhibitionist as a kid.
• If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real…
• When you're working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.
• If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not…
• If there was ever any truth to the trickle-down theory, the only evidence of it I've ever seen was in that period of 1960 to…
• If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't…

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