Ramblin' Jack Elliott

Ramblin' Jack Elliott (born Elliott Charles Adnopoz; August 1, 1931) is an American folk singer, songwriter, and storyteller.

Life and career

Elliott was born in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York City, the son of Florence (Rieger) and Abraham Adnopoz, an eminent doctor. His family was Jewish. He attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn and graduated in 1949. Elliott grew up in Midwood, Brooklyn and inspired by the rodeos at Madison Square Garden and wanted to be a cowboy. Encouraged instead to follow his father's example and become a surgeon, Elliott rebelled, running away from home at the age of 15 to join Col. Jim Eskew's Rodeo, the only rodeo east of the Mississippi. They traveled throughout the Mid-Atlantic states and New England.

Elliott was with them for only three months before his parents tracked him down and had him sent home, but he had been exposed to his first singing cowboy, Brahmer Rogers, a rodeo clown who played guitar and five-string banjo, sang songs, and recited poetry. Back home, Elliott taught himself guitar and started busking for a living. Eventually, he got together with Woody Guthrie and stayed with him as an admirer and student.

With banjo player Derroll Adams, he toured the United Kingdom and Europe. By 1960, he had recorded three folk albums for the UK record label Topic Records. In London, he played small clubs and pubs by day and West End cabaret nightclubs at night. In 1963 while in London, on one or possibly more occasions he recorded two songs in front of a live television audience for the UK regional television folk and blues music series Hullabaloo, presented by the Scottish folksinger Rory McEwen; these sessions were released on DVD in 2020. When he returned to the States, Elliott found he had become renowned in American folk music circles.

Woody Guthrie had the greatest influence on Elliott. Guthrie's son, Arlo, said that because of Woody's illness and early death, Arlo never really got to know him, but learned his father's songs and performing style from Elliott and, according to Arlo, Woody Guthrie once said that Jack Elliot "Sounds more like me than I do". Elliott's guitar and his mastery of Guthrie's material had a significant impact on Bob Dylan when he lived in Minneapolis. When he reached New York, Dylan was sometimes referred to as the 'son' of Jack Elliott, because Elliott had a way of introducing Dylan's songs with the words: "Here's a song from my son, Bob Dylan." Dylan rose to prominence as a songwriter; Elliott continued as an interpretative troubadour, bringing old songs to new audiences in his idiosyncratic manner. Elliott also influenced Phil Ochs, played guitar, and sang harmony on Ochs's cover of the song "Joe Hill" from the Tape from California album. Elliott also discovered singer-songwriter Guthrie Thomas in a bar in Northern California in 1973, bringing Thomas to Hollywood, where Thomas's music career began.

Elliott appeared in Dylan's 1975–1976 Rolling Thunder Revue concert tour, and played "Longheno de Castro" in Dylan's movie Renaldo and Clara accompanied by guitarist Arlen Roth. In the movie, he sings the song "South Coast" by Lillian Bos Ross and Sam Eskin, whose lyric the character's name is derived from.

Elliott also appears briefly in the 1983 film Breathless, starring Richard Gere and directed by Jim McBride.

Elliott plays guitar in both traditional flatpicking and fingerpicking styles, depending on the song, which he matches with his laconic, humorous storytelling, sometimes accompanying himself on harmonica. His singing has a strained, nasal quality, which young Bob Dylan copies. His repertoire includes traditional American music from various genres, including country, blues, bluegrass and folk.

Elliott's nickname comes not from his traveling habits but rather from the countless stories he relates before answering the simplest of questions. Folk singer Odetta claimed that her mother gave him the name, remarking, "Oh, Jack Elliott, yeah, he can sure ramble on!"

His image as a folksy, down-to-earth country boy, despite being a Jewish doctor's son from Brooklyn, and his disdain for other folk singers, were parodied in the fictional documentary A Mighty Wind in the character of a former member of the New Main Street Singers, Ramblin' Sandy Pitnick, a somewhat geeky-looking white man in a cowboy hat. The film's central band of folksingers, the Folksmen (Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer), are said to have scored a hit album called Ramblin'.

In 1995, Elliott's first recording in many years, South Coast, earned him his first Grammy Award. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1998.

His long career and strained relationship with his daughter Aiyana was chronicled in her 2000 film documentary, The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack.