Sing Out! with Elijah Wald

In Greenwich Village during the ’50s and ’60s, you could catch Odetta appropriating operatic vocal dynamics for the coffeehouse set, hear Dylan proselytize at his acoustic peak for crowds at Café Wha? or watch Judy Collins transcend at Gerde’s Folk City. Listen to beatnik-bohemian balladry when writer and musician Elijah Wald performs familiar pieces live and shares archived recordings from the New York Folk Singers Guild. He’ll also school those in attendance on the boundless cool and quietly revolutionary craft of that epoch’s greats, including the often-overlooked Dave Van Ronk, subject of Wald’s 2005 book, The Mayor of MacDougal Street—which is reputedly being used as source material for the Coen brothers’ upcoming folk-scene flick, Inside Llewyn Davis.