Ramblin' Jack Elliott Friends Of Mine (CD)

Ramblin' Jack Elliott

Introducing him on The Johnny Cash Television Show in 1969, Johnny Cash said that nobody he knew had covered more ground, made more friends or sung more songs, with a song and a friend for every mile behind him. The affectionate nickname "Ramblin' Jack" stuck throughout his career, and ten years later, in November 1979, we find the folk troubadour drawing fresh applause at the legendary Keystone in Palo Alto, California.

Before the rise of Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, the Beatles or Led Zeppelin, Ramblin' Jack Elliott had picked up the music and passed it along. From Johnny Cash to Tom Waits, Beck to Bonnie Raitt, a line of icons pays homage to Elliott, the greatest living roving troubadour, who carries the seeds of story and song from one generation to the next. His career is crowded with accolades, yet nothing in words could mean more to a listener than his music, which mirrors his life. His life story is just as absorbing, and glimpses of it can be heard in his songs.

One typical gig had Elliott hobbling on wooden crutches up the aisle of a church, only to be miraculously "healed" by a desperate pastor. Another was his stint as Judge Roy Bean, who would marry you for a dollar. There is no distance between Elliott and the real thing: having run away from his Brooklyn home at fourteen to join the rodeo and learned guitar from a cowboy, his legacy is built on life itself.

He liked to joke that he was born on a 45,000-acre ranch in the middle of Flatbush - what most of us call Brooklyn, New York. By 1950 he had become so taken with the music and life of folk legend Woody Guthrie that he absorbed his future mentor's phrasing and mannerisms, prompting Guthrie to remark that Jack sounded more like him than he did himself; Elliott in turn admitted he had picked up plenty of good things from Woody, and a bad habit or two as well.

His "San Francisco Bay Blues" first appeared on his 1958 UK-only album Jack Takes The Floor (later reissued as Muleskinner), recorded sometime after his 1953 sessions with future Elektra boss Jac Holzman. His frequent visits to England influenced future stars such as Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, with recordings made on Ferrograph tape machines in living rooms, bedrooms and even a yacht moored off the Isle of Wight. He had recently revived the song alongside Arlo Guthrie at the Bread and Roses Festival.

The traditional 19th-century buffalo-hunting song "Buffalo Skinners" is another testament to his deep sense of history and the way he absorbs it and makes it his own. It first appeared on his 1957 album with Derroll Adams, The Rambling Boys, and has travelled ever since through the vocal encyclopaedia of Ramblin' Jack. Of all the talking-blues pieces he has delivered over the years, Guthrie's fishing tale - first aired at the 1962 Philadelphia Folk Festival - makes a welcome return here.

"Barbara Allen" was made famous by Pete Seeger, but like all traditional tunes it derives from something far older. It emerged in the British Isles in the 1600s and, like many traditionals, grew in complexity as it travelled through other cultures; ethnomusicologists call it one of the most widely collected songs in the English language. Like Guthrie, Seeger and Dylan, Elliott takes another step in the long line of adapting traditional songs to contemporary tastes, adding his own creative stamp.

"Arthritis Blues" was written by Baldwin 'Butch' Hawes, husband of Bess Lomax Hawes, whose scholarly brother Alan Lomax had recorded Elliott at his London home in 1955. Bill Fyffe's "I Belong To Glasgow" closes the long journey of Elliott's songbook, carrying the 17th century into the 20th, and the set ends with Tim Hardin's "If I Were A Carpenter". A modern standard like this earns the same respect Elliott gives his talking-blues traditionals.

His voice is both reedy and raspy, his guitar underlining the quiet poise of Hardin's classic - a poignant reading with much the same phrasing that drove his 1969 performance of it on the Johnny Cash Show. As Bob Dylan put it, where most folk musicians waited for you to come to them, Jack went out and grabbed you; he was the king of the folksingers.

A footnote: an autograph-hunting teenager once turned up in boots and a big buckle, full of musical ambition - just the sort of kid who might run away to a rodeo. Elliott looked him deep in the eyes and, with great sincerity, offered his only words of advice: drive a truck, stay out of the music business, and don't smoke cigarettes.

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