LETTERS FROM HOME: BLUES ON A COLD NIGHT IN ARCATA AND REGRETS ON THE BEACH

Aug. 26, 1999

Dear Dixie

At the Jambalaya bar in Northern California late one December night in 1978, my job took me to see the folk-blues singer Dave Van Ronk. I had spent the earlier part of my career asking questions of coaches and athletes, some of whom had seen so many sports interviews on TV that they tended to recite the answers already tattooed on their brains.

Of course, often the questions are the problem with sports interviews. "How great does it feel to win the championship?" is way too popular. Possible answers: a) It feels really great b) It feels so great I can't even tell you how great it feels c) Next question.

Dave Van Ronk was a different kind of assignment.

That night under a smoke-ringed spotlight, he growled out songs he had growled out in Greenwich Village at the birth of the American folk music scene and finger-picked strings in every direction.

Afterward in a back room, he drained a tall glass of Campari and soda on ice and directed me to sit at the owner's desk. Later I learned that Campari and soda is a drink known to help settle a drinker's stomach.

The interview was similar to combat. Every question I asked about his music was turned over and examined for lice before proceeding. Questions he didn't like were spurned with a few words. Others were met with his own questions about my question.

My primary impression is that he was a traditionalist who had little use for music that was popular. The musicians I mentioned did not interest him. Robert Johnson and the Rev. Gary Davis were his masters.

He stood during most of the interview and directed most of his answers to a friend who had come to see him that night. I think he took me for a naif, an apt assessment of someone who'd just landed in California from Southeast Missouri. Naive in Van Ronk's world was the worst thing to be.

At the end, I thanked him for the interview and politely offered that I'd enjoyed talking to him. "No you didn't," he said in that whiskey voice strained through Brooklyn.

You can't argue with the truth.

Years later in Southern California, you insisted to me that brutal honesty is one of the attributes of a true friend. It sounded good and right. But when the time came for harsh honesty, when I learned on a Friday afternoon that your job was in danger, I hesitated to tell you. I didn't have the heart or the stomach for it and hoped for the best.

When the worst happened Monday morning, you already had walked out before I got to work. I was relieved when I heard you were named the editor of the South Coast newspaper and told myself that things worked out for the best. But I live with the regret of not being brutally honest with you.

"I'd rather be sorry for the things I've done than for the things I didn't do" is one of many fine lines Kris Kristofferson has written.

Van Ronk's parting words that night are tattooed on my own brain. I walked back out into the bar stunned. I was accustomed to people being polite, even if it meant saying things that weren't true.

Van Ronk and you made impressions that have stayed with me.

I am more willing to be brutally honest while still hoping to leaven the words with compassion.

Van Ronk is recording Tom Waits and Paul Simon songs now. But the extreme politeness I got high marks for in grade school seems to have worn off, like the varnish on an old bluesman's guitar.

Love, Sam