Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital

The New York City neighborhood that nourished the 1960s folk explosion is celebrated—and its lapse into upscale sterility mourned—in this colorful account. Rolling Stone journalist Browne (So Many Roads) traces four decades of music-making in Greenwich Village, starting in the 1950s, when a modern folk style—pioneered by the likes of Dave Van Ronk—took shape in coffeehouses, nightclubs, and Washington Square Park’s informal concerts. From there, Browne explores the 1960s scene that incubated such superstars as Bob Dylan and Judy Collins and transformed the Village from a working-class enclave into a hippie tourist destination, and chronicles the scene’s decline in the 1980s as soaring rents displaced artists and musicians. The author paints a vivid portrait of infectious creativity and socioeconomic volatility, highlighting the neighborhood’s fashions (“Milling about outside of clubs like the Night Owl, the young men, with their long hair, flowered shirts, pinstriped bell bottoms, and chinos, wanted desperately to resemble a Beatle or a Rolling Stone”) and turf battles between white residents and the racially integrated crowds the folkies brought in. Evocative prose enlivens this captivating ode to a storied chapter of pop culture history. (Sept.)