The new Coen Brothers movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, is out this week. In case you haven’t heard it taking over parts of the city's conversation since it won the Grand Prix at Cannes, its story follows a struggling folk singer in 1960s New York. According to an article in the New York Times, the first idea for Inside Llewyn Davis began as a simple question: “What if a folk singer got beat up outside a Greenwich Village nightclub in 1961?”

While Joel Coen claims that the new movie has a certain kinship with Les Misérables, the Coen Brothers looked to Dave Van Ronk's memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street for inspiration and detail about the milieu they'd be occupying. Van Ronk played New York clubs, coffeehouses, and park gatherings for four decades and recorded more than twenty albums, laying down his versions of tough luck traditional songs like “Motherless Children.” He died in 2002 of colon cancer, and his memoir, published three years later, was put together by Elijah Wald, based on his friend's stories, reminiscences, and a scattering of pages Wald got from him before his death.

Van Ronk was something like the godfather of the movement, known almost just as much for his generosity as musical talent, offering his apartment as an unofficial headquarters for fellow singers. The song he's probably best known for, “Cocaine Blues,” wasn't written by him, and his story captures the bittersweet tone of his level of success. He runs into Jackson Browne in the mid-70s, who told him he'd just recorded one of Van Ronk's songs. This was at a time when things weren't going so well for Van Ronk, and royalties from a hit by Browne would have made a big difference. When Browne tells him the song is “Cocaine Blues,” Van Ronk responds “Jackson, that’s a Gary Davis song, and here’s who you contact to send the royalties to his estate. Now get away from me before you see a grown man cry.”

There’s also the story of seeing Bob Dylan for the first time, “the scruffiest-looking fugitive from a cornfield I do believe I had ever seen.” Van Ronk was impressed by his harmonica playing, which he says sounded like it came from Mars, but rolled his eyes at the self-importance of naming himself after Dylan Thomas. Then again, he says, everyone at the time was going through some self-reinvention, and who was he to judge? After the set, Van Ronk and “Bobby” hung out at Kettle of Fish and “the Coffeehouse Mafia had a new recruit.”

Van Ronk is great with anecdotes like these, and The Mayor of MacDougal Street brims with them. As with Dylan, where he ties their friendship to the “Coffeehouse Mafia,” Van Ronk always situates individual stories into the context of the scene. There may be no better example of this than his laying out of the musical landscape in Washington Square Park right before the folk scene really exploded. The Zionists, the Stalinists, bluegrassers, blues singers, and balladeers packed the park until sundown, laying the foundation for the community of singers, poets, musicians, outcasts, and runaways that populate Van Ronk’s book and the movie it helped inspire.