Am I not being clear, or are people not reading clearly? Dave Van Ronk would never have argued that folk musicians were less brilliant than other musicians, much less that Blind Lemon Jefferson was less of a genius than a music hall composer. But he was not talking about folk musicians like Lemon Jefferson. He was talking about educated urban nightclub entertainers like Bob Dylan, and arguing that they limited their art by limiting themselves to the musical language of the rural south. He thought it was silly. Dylan studied Allen Ginsberg and Baudelaire along with Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie when it came to writing lyrics, and Dave thought he would have been a better songwriter if he had also learned from Ellington and Ives.

Clearly, some very great songwriters worked within three chords -- but rarely by choice. Most "real" folk artists are remarkably adaptable -- I have heard everyone from Scottish ballad singers to old bluesmen do pop material when the folklorists weren't guiding them. Dylan had heard Kurt Weill and Irving Berlin, and cites them as an influence on his work, but he never bothered to learn how to score or harmonize at a more sophisticated level than what he could pick up by jamming with his buddies. To Dave, that was lazy, and limited what Dylan could accomplish. And that was the point we were making in that section of Dave's book.