Ramblin' Jack Elliott - Biography
By J Poet
Ramblin’ Jack Elliot was been a folk singer long before the 60s folk revival he helped inspire. He was one of Woody Guthrie’s last traveling companions, mentored the young Bob Dylan, and hobnobbed with folkies, hippies and beatniks including Oakland’s Jesse Fuller, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He hung out with Cisco Houston, Pete Seeger and The Almanac Singers, the group that slowly mutated into The Weavers, and has recorded countless albums on dozens of labels. Along with Guthrie, he was an early influence on Bob Dylan, and his renditions of Dylan tunes helped popularize Dylan’s music. While he doesn’t write many songs of his own, he’s a masterful interpreter of material with an encyclopedic knowledge of folk, country, blues and classic American pop songs.
When Elliot walks on stage, he dominates the room. Armed with his big acoustic guitar, a world-weary voice full of sly humor and his high voltage charisma, he strings together timeless folk, dusty blues, cowboy songs and country classics and makes them sound brand new. He compliments the music with long between song narratives - kaleidoscopic tales of his life and times - that may sound far fetched, but are usually true.
“I was one of the first people to hear [Kerouac’s novel] On The Road,” Elliot said in a 2006 interview. “In 1953, just after he finished writing it, he came over to an apartment I had in Greenwich Village and sat on the floor and started reading aloud. It was about 700 pages, on one big, long scroll of paper. It took three days and many bottles of wine for him to finish. Years later, I gave a reading of it myself in Paris, with [beat poets] Gregory Corso and Ginsberg. I read from On The Road and [Woody Guthrie’s autobiography] Bound For Glory and they recited poetry. I played some songs too. It was at the famous Mistral bookstore on the Left Bank.”
Elliot was born in Brooklyn as Elliot Adnopoz, in 1931. A doctor’s son, he became Ramblin’ Jack, traveling cowboy singer, by force of will. As his stories suggest, his Ramblin’ nickname comes as much from his free form storytelling as it does from his predilection for wandering the globe. “I was born on August first, the same day as Jerry Garcia, which was tricky to arrange, since he’s so much younger than I am,” Elliot says in his slightly cracked cowboy drawl. “The stork who brought me was supposed to drop me out west, so I could be a cowboy, but he stopped along the way in Montana to meet Will James, the cowboy writer and artist. Will was in a bar trading his artwork for food, which he did periodically. The stork got drunk and lost his bearings and dropped me in Brooklyn [with the Adnopoz family] by mistake.
“My family name was difficult to pronounce. When I ran away from home as a teenager to join a traveling rodeo and groom horses for two dollars a day, I couldn’t utter it. I was kinda shy, so they called me Poncho after the rodeo clown who had this talent for getting bulls to hook the belt of his pants with their horns. I took the name Buck Elliot when I started playing cowboy songs on the guitar, just before I got invited to drive to California with a friend. This was 1950 and it was gravel roads all the way and 15 feet of snow on the Donner Pass. I got a job in San Francisco, working in the Merchant Marine Museum, and met Commodore Tompkins, who sailed around Cape Horn on the Wanderbird, an 1880s German pilot boat without a motor. The boat was tied up in Sausalito. When he invited me to come aboard, I told him I was Buck Elliot, but he introduced me to his mom as Jack Elliot. I was too shy to correct him. I was 19 at the time and lived on the Wanderbird for three months listening to his collection of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie records.”
Elliot had an uncanny knack for remembering the traditional folk and early country tunes he heard in his travels, both live and on record; after all these years he still doesn’t use a set list when he hits the stage. “I know about 600 songs well enough to sing without any difficulty. That’s my working repertoire.”
Elliot has been playing guitar and singing all his life, but his recording career, although impressive has been sporadic. He cut a few sides for small east coast labels in the 50s, then moved to England in 1955, where there was a booming interest in American folk music that predated the American folk revival by about five years. His first album, Woody Guthrie’s Blues was cut for the Topic label in London in 1957. He came back to the States in ’61 and met Dylan in Guthrie’s hospital room. The albums that introduced Elliot to American folkies were cut for the small Prestige label (now part of the Concord Music Group). Ramblin’ Jack Elliot (1961), At Main Point (1962) and Country Style (1962). Country Style was mostly country songs, a genre scorned by many hippies, but Elliot made the material come to life with his powerful singing and introduced many folkies to real hard core country. The eponymous Jack Elliot (Vanguard 1964) may be his best album ever, a collection of long time concert favorites and newer tunes that he’d honed during his rambles in Europe. He recorded briefly for Warner/Reprise in the late 60s. Young Bringham (Reprise 1968) included two Elliot originals, including the rambling epic “912 Greens.”
Elliot stayed busy on the folk circuit most of his life, but stayed out of the studio for most of the 70s, 80s and early 90s. When he did start recording again, he won a Best Folk Album Grammy for South Coast (Red House) in 1995; President Clinton gave him a National Medal of Arts in 1998, and the documentary film his daughter Aiyana made about their relationship, The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack, won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2000.
Elliot’s gift has always been interpreting the songs of others, but on his first album in the 21st Century, I Stand Alone (Anti, 2006) he delivers “Woody’s Last Ride,” one of his own rare compositions. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a song,” Elliot says modestly. “Aiyana kept asking me about Woody’s last cross-country trip with [folk banjo player] Billy Faier and Brew Moore, a bebop sax player. I tell the story while playing a little guitar lick. We were delivering a Buick to an owner in Southern California. Woody was going out to buy land in Topanga Canyon, where he wound up running off with the wife of an actor. I took a trip with them to Florida and, me being young, I didn’t realize my presence was making them uncomfortable. I had no idea Woody wanted to be alone with his young sweetie.
“That trip started out in New York City at Washington Square Park; Woody and I were there singing. Everybody knew who he was and he was obviously not real flush, or in the best of health. He was starting to show the effects of that horrible disease that killed him [Huntington's Chorea.] He was also an alcoholic and had a great big curly black beard. We passed a paper beer mug around and, when it as full, we went and converted some of it into beer and some of it into paper money at the San Remo Bar on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal. Then we got in the car and left for California. We made 11 dollars and 60 cents singing and that got us from coast to coast.”
With his wealth of experience and his innate gift for spinning yarns, Elliot seems like a natural for a tell-all biography. It’s a thought that’s crossed his mind more than once. “I’ve tried dictating into a tape recorder and wasted months of time and hours of tape; it was always a disaster. I have a romantic image of myself in a tweed jacket and pipe sitting at a typewriter on a book jacket, but dealing with royalties and book tours is a little scary. At this point, I’ve had it with the traveling world. If I do any more traveling it’ll be in a Silver Eagle motor home or a hearse.” In 2009 he released A Stranger Here.