By: Dennis Cook

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott has been at the center of folk music since the genre’s 1960s mega-explosion, and was already a well regarded figure even before that. It was Elliott that helped teach Woody Guthrie’s songs to a young Bob Dylan, and it was Brooklyn born Jack who brought some trail dust into Greenwich Village, a boy inspired by the rodeos that used to come through Madison Square Garden. Fast approaching 80-years-old, he’s a traditional bard, a carrier of songs from town to town, building on and honoring a long line of tunesmiths.

He’s the sort of fella that can readily tell Shinola from that other stuff, and he’ll let you know with a wink that he’s onto you. For the past 15 years he’s lived near Point Reyes in Northern California, a spot removed enough from the bright lights of San Francisco to feel some distance from modern hustle ‘n’ bustle, but Elliott laments, “You gotta drive about 30 miles to find a lemon.” From his first job loading and unloading trucks at a lumber yard to his many adventures on sea and land, at home and abroad, Ramblin’ Jack has gathered up myriad tales and melodies, and has been instrumental in passing the best ones onto future generations. There is such joy for the simple pleasures of day-to-day life in Ramblin’ Jack’s music, a hearty embrace of the many small things that nourish us and bring color into our hours. Even the darker moments are tied to what it means to be human and ramble around the time we’re given.

His latest album, A Stranger Here (released April 7 on Anti-), is a collection of 1930s songs written during the Great Depression. Produced with great strength and delicacy by Joe Henry, it is one of Elliott’s finest hours, where the years apparent in his voice wrangle with the ghosts of a vibrant saloon where everyone has scraped together their last dime for one more good time. It’s an oddly modern album and a brave one from someone who could merely coast on his rep and earn his living recreating the ’60s faves his audience adores. Tackling great material from Leroy Carr, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Willie Johnson and Lonnie Johnson, Ramblin’ Jack shows himself worthy company to these blues masters, and the crack band behind him, including guest turns from Van Dyke Parks and Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo, moves with sinewy perfection throughout.

In an attempt to keep the rangin’ around reasonable, we’ve included some but not all of Jack’s frequent digressions. Befitting the nickname he earned, according to legend, from Odetta’s mom, a conversation with the man is a ramblin’ affair. However, we did our level best to get him talking about his latest effort, his days in Greenwich Village, his influences and more. But what chat with Ramblin’ Jack would be complete without a few tangents?

JamBase: I think the new album is pretty darn cool. Even though these are Depression era songs, they seem to be coming around at just the right time.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

Ramblin’ Jack: I didn’t plan it that way. In fact, the whole idea of a collection of those songs was due to the producer [Joe Henry] and a record label guy named Andy. They put their heads together and found 15 songs and put ‘em on a CD for me to listen to and pick out about 10 of the 15. Some of ‘em seemed like they were going to be tough to do, others seemed plum impossible, and I didn’t want to say anything. I just listened to ‘em for three months, and I never memorized any of them. So, it made me quite nervous when we drove down to L.A. to record them. I didn’t know anything by heart but hopefully I’d developed a little feel for them.

JamBase: In some ways that’s advantageous, going in without a clear idea because a number of these tunes are so well established and so oft-covered. There’s a zillion versions of “Soul Of A Man,” though I think yours stands up just fine.

Ramblin’ Jack: Oh yeah. Originally they wanted to use ["Soul Of A Man"] for the title of the album. I thought, “Yeah, and I’ll start my own church!” It was a little bit too heavy for me.

It’s daunting to get behind a pulpit. I’m not sure most of us should do it willingly.

Including myself [laughs].

This album is part and parcel of what you do. You’re an interpreter and carrier of songs. You’ve had your ear to ground since you started, listening for songs that need to be passed along to the next generation.

I never thought about it in so many words, but it feels like that’s part of it alright. I hear a lot of music that’s exciting and fun and entertaining but I rarely get latched onto a song. There’s so much good music out there and I enjoy hearing it, but I rarely ever want to bother to try and pick up on it.

What is it that attracts you to a song?

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

In the case of these songs [on A Stranger Here], I really didn’t like a lot of them because I thought I wasn’t capable of doing them – I didn’t have enough of a voice or felt I could live up to their tough background. A singer like Blind Willie Johnson, well, I’ve always admired his voice and his singing but I never thought I could dare to try and interpret one of his songs. He sounds like a big, tough, hard as nails man who’s seen everything AND he’s blind! A lot of my favorite musicians are blind, like Rev. Gary Davis. I’ve toured with Reverend Davis and admire him, but I never thought I’d be able to do any of his stuff. This is the first time I’ve ever dared to do it. I really didn’t dare to do it, I just lit into it!

When I got to the studio, there were only two musicians that I really met before and four or five that I’d never met. And they were just ready to go, and they just followed me along so well. I think they did their homework.

There’s a lively sense of engagement from everyone on A Stranger Here, everybody just throwing in.

Yeah, they are! [Pauses] Excuse me for a minute. My sweetie was just trying to bring me some breakfast she just made and I told her not right now. I’ll eat later or eat it cold, whatever. It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day. I was gonna take my sweetie rowing in a boat I have here but it was full of rainwater and it took me an hour to bail out. We had to go somewheres else and we didn’t get to row.

So, do you feel lucky, if that’s even the right word, to have picked Depression era songs given the current shambles the U.S. economy is in?

It was their suggestion and I thought I’d go along with it. These guys know what they’re doing, and I respect their wisdom about what might be a good subject to address. I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I said, “Send me these songs and I’ll learn ‘em,” which is not my usual way. But, I thought it’d be very professional and to my credit if I didn’t bitch and complain and just tried to go along with their suggestion and see if I could make the best of it. And it worked!

It’s arriving at just the moment that people are going to need songs about living through hard times.

That should work good for the popularity of it [laughs].

The best songs speak to truths larger than just today.

Ramblin’ Jack & Woody Guthrie by John Cohen

There’s a lot to be said for that! My sweetie pie here is a musician, and she played me a record someone had sent her that was very popular back in the ’50s. And it’s in the ’50s style and it’s about a gal named Vickie, which is my sweetie’s name. It’s a cute song in a style of music you don’t hear anymore. I like it because it’s about my honey baby, but they sent it to her as a joke. And I thought, “That music was once popular. God, how could anybody listen to that crap?” Now, it’s real cheap and tinsel-y. It was sort of like kindergarten music.

In a lot of ways, popular music in America since the 1950s has played to that kind of kindergarten mentality.

That’s when I left America for about six years, traveling around on a motor scooter and singing on street corners with my first wife. That was 1955-1961. I was gone for six years except for a period of 10 months in 1958 where I was back in the States.

You got to miss The Four Freshman and a lot of the other bubblegum crap that came out in the late ’50s.

You know the guy from Lubbock, Texas with the black horn-rim glasses [Buddy Holly]? Well, I didn’t know who he was, and I didn’t know Bob Dylan. Actually hardly anybody knew him at that time, but he was hanging out in New York with a bunch of friends of mine and we were communicating by letter and postcard. But somehow the friends in the city never mentioned Bob, perhaps afraid I’d be upset or something that somebody was diggin’ my potatoes. Bob was visiting Woody [Guthrie] in the hospital at that time and I knew nothing about it. When I got back to the States in November 1961, came back on a big ocean liner called The Liberte, I stayed overnight in New York City and then took a bus out to New Jersey to visit Woody in the hospital the next morning, and there was this kid Bob there. That’s how I met Bob but I’d never heard about him at all. It got very hard to understand Woody as he spoke as that horrible, horrible disease [Huntington's disease] took him away. He lasted 13 years in hospitals.

I think a lot of people see you as one of the inheritors and torchbearers for Woody’s legacy. Do you feel that way about it, that kind of responsibility?

I do! When I went to Europe I was mostly bringing Woody’s music there. There were people, in England mostly, who’d heard of Woody and collected one or two of his records, and they were quite enthusiastic about the fact that I’d been living with and traveling with Woody. I entertained them with lots of stories about Woody and played some songs as they pulled up a chair.

Continue reading for more on Ramblin’ Jack Elliott…

  As we get older more and more people are dying. The people we knew or know and loved are leaving us. It becomes more and more apparent that we ourselves may have to leave. -Ramblin’ Jack Elliott  

Woody’s songs still feel so fresh to me. When you hear a new voice try out one of his songs it sorta makes you skip a little.

Ramblin’ Jack with Bob Dylan :: Greenwich Village, early ’60s

Boy, I haven’t heard a lot of people doing Woody’s songs lately, but I need to get out there more. I was invited out to a tribute in New York to Odetta, who passed recently. Odetta’s mom is the one who supposedly named me Ramblin’ Jack, and I had some very good moments with Odetta in the past few years and I knew I might not see her again because she was very sick. But I can’t travel right now. I’m about to go into the hospital. I’m not sick or anything, just having a new hip put in. I had another hip put in about seven years ago and it made me feel about 20 years younger.

You’re getting to be one of the last of the old guard that was there in Greenwich Village at the dawn of what we now call modern folk music.

My girlfriend was just showing me a book I have around here called Washington Square Memories – The Great Urban Folk Boom, which was published in 1970, and I’m right there on the cover, sitting there playing the ol’ Gretsch guitar. That was a long time ago, and I really enjoyed looking at the pictures of all these people I’d almost forgotten about. Half of ‘em I don’t know if they’re still alive or not. I don’t know whatever happened to Bonnie Dobson. Joan Baez is around and everyone knows that. And there’s Loudon Wainwright III, who looks so young. He wrote “Dead Skunk (in the Middle of the Road),” and I think of him often. I had a wonderful time with him one evening. He showed up at a gig I played on Eel Pie Island in the Thames. We went to his hotel with a big bottle of scotch and the evening progressed. I don’t remember how I found the way back to my hotel. Must have had a good driver with me.

Do you like to personalize a song, particularly traditional material, when you take it on to give it something of your own stamp?

I guess I do, but I haven’t worked at it the active way others do. It just sort of happens gradually.

Who were some of your earliest inspirations that made you want to pick up a guitar and sing?

Ramblin’ Jack with Miss John Hurt in 1964 by Jim Marshall

The very first guitar person I ever noticed – I’d been listening to New Orleans jazz, which I liked quite a bit – was a black man by the name of Lonnie Johnson. One of the songs that Lonnie sang, “New Stranger Blues,” I do on the new album, that goes, “I wander into town and I wonder why everybody wants to dog me down.” I met Lonnie three times. He came and played at Gerde’s Folk City in New York [where Dylan played his first professional gig], and then I saw him in Philadelphia one time. Someone told me to go down to this subterranean bar where there was a bartender by the name of Bill Cosby who told jokes. Sure enough, there was this bartender behind the bar telling jokes. And he invited me to take my guitar and sing a few songs, which I was glad to do. I went behind the bar and he held the microphone up and I played into the microphone. But I didn’t have any picks with me. I heard this music coming through the walls from a neighboring bar next door, and they had a door that went through. I immediately recognized Lonnie Johnson’s guitar. I stopped playing whatever song I was singing and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, that is Lonnie Johnson! I do declare, what do you know about that! I have to go see him.” I brought my little concert to an immediate halt and Lonnie loaned me a guitar pick, and I was proud to keep it. Then, I went back in and played some more.

I love when musicians are stalled by another musician they REALLY love. It’s like, “I’m doing my thing but please make sure you pay attention to this guy!”

The last time I saw Lonnie Johnson he had an old nightclub in Toronto and we were doing a TV show in the nightclub. And my wife at the time was pregnant, and she was in the back of the room watching the soundcheck. We were up there playing a few notes, and Lonnie Johnson noticed my wife in the back of the room as she reached her arms up to the ceiling to stretch. And he immediately got very excited and said, “Don’t do that! Put your hands down!” It seems a lot of old Southern black folks had a belief that if a pregnant woman raised her arms up over her head that the baby would strangle because the umbilical cord would get wrapped up inside.

Do you collect tidbits like that about local culture and language and customs from earlier time periods?

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

I sometimes think my house is getting to be like the storeroom of a museum, and I’m going to have to sell all this stuff just to get rid of it. I can’t bear to throw it away. It’s all junk but probably of value to somebody. I don’t think of myself as a collector but I try to remember things mentally. I got a million stories about various adventures I’ve had and meeting odd people.

You have this hobo mythology that runs through your career.

I need a bigger house! I need to get a barn somewhere. I thought about renting a hanger at a little airport here in Marin. But I don’t really recommend collecting stuff. I’ve got 50-feet of rusty anchor chain in my truck that somebody gave me for my boat. The next day I met an old pirate friend of mine who’s moving away and he’s got a boat. And he said he had some brand new anchor chain, which was much stronger. We have gale force winds in the Bay that have reached up to a 130 mph. So, I immediately bought 63-feet of new chain from my pirate friend since the other was a smaller gauge and a bit rusty. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. You put a lot of strain on a chain and it’ll break [laughs].

What was it like to work with Joe Henry?

I did one song with Joe a few years ago for the Bob Dylan movie I’m Not There. We recorded a song called “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” I’d heard it a million times but never learned it, so when he said, “This is the song we’d like you to do,” once again it was the case that he’s such an erudite person with such respect and good feeling that I didn’t want to offend him by disagreeing or suggesting anything else. I thought, “Let’s go. Let’s do it.” I didn’t get to know that song well until I was in the studio. Loudon was there and played guitar and banjo behind me on that recording, along with two or three other musicians as well. We just blended really fine, and it was just a good selection.

You sound pretty comfortable with the setting he’s created on the new recordings. There’s a very full sound to this album, and even though they’re Depression era tunes it feels quite modern.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

Yeah, I liked all those guys we played with, even if I didn’t know but two of them, the piano player [Keith Ciancia] and the guitar player [Greg Leisz]. I think the drums especially made it strange and beautiful. The drummer’s name is Jay Bellerose and he flew out from Nashville just for this session, and he tours with Alison Krauss.

Just based on the tales you’ve told me today, it’s clear you have a good memory, Jack. How many songs do you think you know?

It’s very, very difficult to memorize songs now. In fact, I have not memorized ANY of the songs on the new album yet. I recorded them eight months ago and I think they’re going to want me to play some of ‘em when we get on the road to help sell records. I’m losing four brain cells a day.

When I heard “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” and a few songs on the last record [2006's I Stand Alone], I was struck by the way you sing about mortality now. There’s a real depth to these performances, and I wondered how you come at them, especially as a 78-year-old, when those issues tend to loom large for one?

I’ve always been very scared of death. It never bothered me when I was doing all these death defying sports and things, like bronc riding and driving semi-trailers and flying airplanes. And I never was close to anyone when they died. When my mother passed away I was on tour with Bob Dylan. When my dad died I was touring up in New England. And then finally to be with somebody when they died, my last wife Jan, it was a remarkable, wonderful but, of course, terribly sad adventure in my life. They say death is part of life, and most people know that, but I didn’t really quite now that. I don’t like to drive on I-5 because I’ve seen a lot of recently dead bodies on I-5 that fell asleep at the wheel because it’s a boring road. I’d rather drive on 101 and take a few hours more through beautiful country.

As we get older more and more people are dying. The people we knew or know and loved are leaving us. It becomes more and more apparent that we ourselves may have to leave. I’ve just avoided thinking about it for a long time. But as each successive mortality happens you can’t avoid or sweep it under the carpet for long. You gotta think about it. I’m still too horrified by the thought of it to get into the subject much [from my own songwriting perspective]. I love life. I love life so much.

JamBase | Enduring
Go See Live Music!