Creativity Quote by Dave Van Ronk

Name-dropping the Brooklyn Navy Yard isn’t nostalgia; it’s a credibility stamp. Dave Van Ronk came up as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street,” a downtown folk scene figure who wore authenticity like a work jacket. So when he points to an uncle and grandfather who “worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” he’s anchoring his artistry in something sturdier than bohemian pose: industrial Brooklyn, union labor, wartime production, the kind of job that leaves soot under your nails and a sense of belonging you don’t have to perform.

The intent is deceptively plain. Van Ronk isn’t telling you what they built or when; he’s telling you what kind of people made him. The subtext is class memory. The Navy Yard was once one of New York’s great engines, a place where immigrant and working-class families found wages, routine, and pride. By the time Van Ronk was mythologized in the 1960s folk revival, that world was already starting to feel like a vanishing inheritance, threatened by deindustrialization and the city’s shifting economy. The line quietly mourns without asking for sympathy.

It also works as a subtle rebuke to a scene obsessed with “real” roots. Folk music traded heavily on origin stories. Van Ronk’s version is unromantic: no sharecropper fantasy, no pastoral purity - just Brooklyn labor and family continuity. It’s a way of saying: I’m not playing working-class; I’m from it.