CarolC:

I never took a college class in music, but like many folks in my general age group, I learned songs, and learned to play, in the context of an educated and technologically-advanced society, i.e., by having access to recordings and songbooks, etc., and by jamming with peers who enjoyed the same access and the same surfeit of leisure time. Many of us had the same experience whether we were college students or college dropouts; I never meant to refer to any classroom experience, only to our very modern and somewhat privileged existence.

My point was that Taj Mahal, Dave Van Ronk and I, and presumably you as well, enjoyed an entirely different lifestyle and a different kind of exposure to music than someone like Fred MacDowell. Fred was a wonderful musician, of course, and quite a guy too, for that matter ~ I don't mean to denigrate anything about him. But the musical horizons and experience available to an illiterate sharecropper in Como, MS, were pretty narrow when Fred was a young man; of course, that was probably a contributing factor to how DEEP into that groove he could get...

There are many places you could start exploring Dave Van Ronk, but one you might consider would be the recently-released live recording of his final concert. I've been meaning to buy a copy and haven't done so yet; the information is referenced somewhere in some Mudcat thread, and I assume it can be found out on the web by a Google search. Maybe someone will post info on this CD (or anything else they might recommend) here.