Ramblin' Jack Elliott in Guitar.com's Spotlight Feature #200

Ramblin' Man
Woody Guthrie Lives On
by Tristram Lozaw
http://www.guitar.com/features/viewfeature.asp?featureID=200

Check out any of the other artists featured in Guitar.com's Artist Spotlight by searching ALL. http://www.guitar.com/features/viewfeature.asp?featureID=200&genre=&alphasort=All#featureindex

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Anyone ever see Ramblin' Jack in concert? I have the opprotunity later this spring, and I wanted to hear some experiences.
I'm jumping out of my skin...what a terrific Easter surprise this was! <img src="http://www.arlo.net/ubb/smilies/smile.gif" width=15 height=15>

Kerry, altho I've never seen RJE live, I've heard enough of his music to know! HE KICKS some FOLKING ASS!!! Go see the concert and let us know the real deal!.....<img src="http://www.arlo.net/ubb/smilies/smile.gif" width=15 height=15>

*YOU GO GIRL!

I had the pirvilege of seeing Ramblin' Jack and Odetta with Josh White, Jr. last summer at an outdoor venue in Cleveland Hts., Ohio. It was a great show, lots of wonderful tunes. Ramblin' Jack can still play a great guitar--now if he could only remember the lyrics.......

It was a wonderful show.

Has anyone seen the video "Ballad of Ramblin' Jack?" It was made by his daughter--guess who she interviewed as part of the research? Yup, adg hisself. He's in there.

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The first time I ever heard of Ramblin' Jack Elliot was when Kris Kristofferson mentioned his name in song. That was a long time ago. Since then I've listened to and have learned many of Jack's songs. His version of The House Of The Rising Sun still does something to me. When I first heard it I remember thinking that "this is how the song should really be sung". And so that's how I sing it.

Peace!

Interview with Ramblin' Jack Elliott in thirstyearfestival.com

http://www.thirstyearfestival.com/interviews/elliot.html <FONT size="1">July 2002</FONT s>

My friend, Sneezin' Jeff, studied Dramatic Writing at NYU, and he has a folk storytelling act called "Sneezin' Jeff and Blue Raccoon." Blue is a guy named Anton who admits to having played with Arlo at Carnegie Hall. Anyway, Jeff began listening to all of the folk artists of yesteryear, and enjoyed Ramblin' Jack. He based his own character partially on Jack's style. So, a friend of Jeff's from NYU was working in Texas, and spotted Jack in a restaurant. He began to tell Jack about Jeff's play. Jeff's friend came back with a Diner check, and on it was written, "Jeff, Pls send a copy of the play. Ramblin' Jack Elliott." The check was displayed on Jeff's shelf in his apartment on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village for a long while. Finally, he invited me to the Bottom Line to hear Jack perform. Shortly after, Jack's documentary was being screened on Sixth Avenue, and we laughed at his childhood desire to be a cowboy. Anyway, I last saw Jack at the Tin Angel, and he was walking with a cane. Another friend, who is a professional photographer from Marin County told us Jack lives there. It's been fun being touched by his charming humor, and we will miss 'em

I just watched "The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack" for the first time last night. What a great and intresting documentary this was.
(Thanks Dee for the dvd birthday gift!)
Anyone that is a fan of Jack, Woody or of folk music in general should see this.
I found the history contained in it very intresting, as well as the fact that it's Jack's daughter trying to get to know Jack and introduce us to him at the same time. A journey shared in a sense.It was like a book I couldn't put down.
I liked Arlo's hatchet story too! <img src="http://www.arlo.net/ubb/smilies/smile.gif" width=15 height=15> (You gotta see the movie, I ain't talkin'!)

Just saw Ramblin' Jack at the Church Thursday night. Though Jack was a little under the weather, it was fantastic. It was an historical night for me as I was able to see Jack, Arlo & Sarah all sharing the same stage. It is about as close to Woody as you can get.

I was there too. What a nice time, and what a living tresure this guy is.
There was also something special about Arlo sitting in with Jack and looking (To my eyes anyway) at Jack the way many of us look at Arlo.

I was there too! (Thanks to Larry) What a wonderful night. It was great to watch Arlo and Jack and see the obvious affection between them. Jack signed my "Ballad of" DVD. On the cover photo he is smoking. Jack insisted on crossing out the cigarette because "I don't like em anymore since I got emphysema a few years ago" which saddened me a bit but Jacks' still going strong in spite of it. As I said goodnight to Jack he fixed my collar and told me to button up cause it's cold out there. Just a really sweet guy. Thanks Jack.

Star Telegram | 02/20/2004 | Ramblin' to Denton

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/entertainment/7998599.htm

Woody Guthrie's heir, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, is the last of the singing cowboys
http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/29/1080412287299.html

have an album of jack elliot ,bought in 1970's ,remember cocaine blues,new york town,bought for £2.

"Woody, Bob and me"
http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=161122005
Woody, Bob and me

JIM GILCHRIST


THERE’S ONE SONG BY KRIS Kristofferson, The Pilgrim, which many believe to be about American music legend Ramblin’ Jack Elliott - although some say it’s about Johnny Cash while William McIlvanney claims it’s about Rangers hero Jim Baxter.

Ask Ramblin’ Jack himself - archetypal American troubadour, one-time sidekick of Woody Guthrie, one-time mentor of Bob Dylan - and you can bet that he’ll amiably quote you the lyrics:

He’s a pilgrim, he’s a poet.
He’s a problem when he’s stoned.
He’s a walkin’ contradiction,
Partly truth and partly fiction.

"It fits the bill," muses Elliott, now 73 and preparing to hit the road again, including a rare visit to Scotland: he will play Edinburgh Folk Club on 17 February, after collecting a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. "Kris said it was about me, and about Johnny Cash, and Dennis Hopper, and two or three others, but he said I had a lot to do with it. It’s a nice song but I don’t sing it. It’s a bit silly to go around singing songs about yourself."

The hard-living, hard-travelling singer and guitarist - whom the writer Sam Shepard described as "a wandering, mythical, true American minstrel" - is talking from his California home, expressing mixed feelings over the emergence of The Lost Topic Tapes, two CDs of long-vanished material, recorded for the Topic folk label in 1957 while on board a schooner in Cowes Harbour. A few tracks were issued on a 1959 album, but the rest were only unearthed from the National Sound Archives in 1999, by long-time fan Robert Wylie of Clydebank. They have now been issued by the American Hightone label.

Asked about that session, Elliott, an enthusiastic sailor, launches into a characteristically lengthy description of the schooner Magnet, on which he and first wife June were spending a prolonged honeymoon in Europe.

"She was built in 1890, re-rigged into a schooner and a very beautiful craft she was," he says. "She wasn’t a very comfortable yacht, very plainly appointed inside, so there’s a slight echo of the sound bouncing off the wood.You can even hear some mooring lines creaking..."

And the music, Mr Elliott? " Well, I hear somebody who was very young. I was 25, just fresh out of my apprenticeship with Woody [Guthrie] and was trying to imitate him and I thought I was hot stuff." He laughs. "I find it very embarrassing to listen to and I think there’s only two songs in the 30 worth listening to. The rest are all shit."

An injustice, really. The recordings capture that high, dry and lonesome voice in some classic material, such as Tom Joad, John Henry, and his signature song, Guthrie’s Hard Travelin’. "Oh there’s no accounting for taste," he replies when I mention the good reviews. "We’re living in an era of deafness anyway, thanks to rock and roll, so people don’t know what music is supposed to sound like, God bless ‘em."

With Elliott, Ramblin’ is the operative word, conversational as much as peregrinatory. His fund of tales is well nigh inexhaustible, whether its singing Muleskinner Blues to Ravi Shankar over a curry, serenading Princess Margaret at a party with "a slightly off-colour ditty", meeting blues man Big Bill Broonzy at the Roundhouse in Soho, or how flash photography makes him psychotic: "I don’t like flash bulbs. it’s like they snip my brain, so I can’t remember the words."

Then, of course, there is how the 15-year-old Elliott Charles Adnopoz, driven by his infatuation with cowboy culture, ran away from his middle-class Brooklyn Jewish parents to join a rodeo, returning reluctantly to graduate from high school. He was 19 when he met Woody Guthrie and spent five years listening and learning before the Dustbowl balladeer succumbed to Huntington’s chorea. Guthrie once remarked that his protégé, 20 years his junior, sounded "more like me than I do".

In 1961, after six years in Europe, Elliott returned to the US, where his reputation as Guthrie sidekick and mean flatpicker had already acquired mythic status, only to find himself playing a similarly guru-like role to the young Bob Dylan. There’s a tale about the two of them, listening to the radio in Dylan’s car, hearing Geordie blues merchants the Animals singing House of the Rising Sun, and both exclaiming: "That’s my version." True story, chuckles Elliott - "but of course it wasn’t ours, it was the Animals’ version. We didn’t know that someone else had recorded it."

The essence of the man - peerless balladeer and raconteur but also singularly absent parent - is captured in The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack, directed by his daughter, Aiyana, which pulls no punches at the trials of the women in his life (he’s been married four times). "The film says it all," concedes Elliott. Yet whatever his daughter’s frustrations at her wayward father, it must remain tempered with affection; she’s also the manager of his forthcoming tour.

The film is being shown on 20 February as part of the Edinburgh Filmhouse’s American Folk season. The live show, three days earlier, will stick to the tried and tested. "I don’t learn new songs very well," Elliott confesses. "I’ve been trying to learn Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black Lightning for five years. But, you know, it was the Black Shadow that was the really dangerous bike..." And we’re off again, on another, wonderfully circumlocutory tale. Ramble on, Jack.

• Ramblin’ Jack Elliott plays the Pleasance, Edinburgh, 17 February. The Lost Topic Tapes - Isle of Wight 1957 and Cowes 1957 are on Hightone Records.