Jack Elliott: Still ramblin' at 93

Folk legend and good Kerouac friend plays on

He’s had a life almost twice as long as his friend Jack Kerouac and has, along the way, met and mingled with so many of the musical and literary greats, from folkies to rockers and Beats, fromI the last century and beyond. Counterculture commentator and regular Rock and the Beat Generation contributor JONAH RASKIN profiles a man with some 40 albums to his name and the honour of joining Bob Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue back in 1975…

RAMBLIN’ JACK Elliott wasn’t a Beat Generation poet or a cool rock’n’roller, but, in 1981, decades after he first went on the road and performed folk music, he recorded the album Kerouac’s Last Dream. It was a long time coming yet perhaps somewhat inevitable.

The two Jacks, Kerouac and Elliott, were both city-born East Coast boys who roamed around the American West, worked at odd jobs, listened to the voices of working men and women and celebrated the folk in their own work. Both were dedicated to their art and both kept moving, like rolling stones, one night say.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who was born in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York – near the height of the Depression and close to that moment when the Dust Bowl refugees, made famous by John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie, undertook their testing trails – has survived almost than twice as long as ramblin’ Kerouac.

Composer, musician, sideman and conductor David Amram, born in 1930 and recently turned 94, belongs to the same generation as Jack Elliott. Amram thinks of himself and Elliott as the ‘two surviving older guys who knew and remained friends with Kerouac before and after On the Road made him a reluctant star.’

Pictured above: Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

To those who want to survive today Amram advises, ‘inhale, don't forget to exhale, hang out with positive people as much as possible and stay enrolled in the University of Hangout-ology, which has no tuition fees and you’ll find that every person you cross paths with can teach you a lesson.’

Amram relates to me a story that Odetta told him: ‘Just remember Ammy-rammy, she said, whatever genre you choose to express yourself in, folk is the root of the tree and so we must always nourish and honor those roots.’

Like Kerouac, Ramblin’ Elliott – who was born Elliott Charles Adnopo – has honored the folk roots of the tree. Like Kerouac, he saw the landscape of the US for the first time from inside a car, in his case, a 1937 Plymouth that took him and a friend in the Air Force (his Neal Cassady) across the Great Plains and all the way to San Francisco.

‘There weren’t any interstates, just Highway 40, and it took eight days,’’ Elliott recalled. He said that the sound he heard for thousands of miles was, ‘Thump, thump, thump’ – the sound of tyre rubber on poorly paved roads – a rhythm that got into his head and stayed there.

Like Kerouac’s Beat brother Allen Ginsberg, Ramblin’ Jack was born into an immigrant Jewish family, and, like Ginsberg, he had an innate love of song and the spoken word. In January 2024, at the age of 92, Ramblin’ Jack performed on stage in San Francisco, along with members of his tribe: Jackson Browne, Steve Earle, Rickie Lee Jones, Rodney Crowell, Dave Alvin, Victoria Williams and Sarah Lee Guthrie, Woody’s granddaughter. No wonder he’s been called ‘a folksinger’s folksinger’.

The Ballad of the Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a 105-minute documentary from 2000, is available on Amazon. It’s produced and directed by Elliott’s daughter, Aiyana, and is as good a place as any to become familiar with the voice and the face of the enduring singer.

Still, Beat Generation fans and rock‘n’rollers might want to dive directly into his vast body with one of his stellar forty albums: Woody Guthrie’s Blues – released in 1956, just before On the Road first appeared in print— or The Long Ride from 1999 or I Stand Alone from 2006 and many more besides.

Aiyana Elliott’s Ballad offers on-camera interviews with her father, images of him singing and playing the guitar and archival footage of Woody Guthrie, who inspired Ramblin’ Jack, plus Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie, known most of all for Alice’s Restaurant, and Bob Dylan, who began his career by imitating Jack who began his career by imitating Guthrie himself.

Pictured above: Elliott with Bob Dylan

Dylan outdistanced Elliott, though he did invite Jack to join him on the 1975–1976 Rolling Thunder Revue concert tour, where he was accompanied by guitarist Arlen Roth. Elliott then appeared as Longheno de Castro in the subsequent Dylan movie Renaldo and Clara.

In the early 1950s in New York, I followed the folk music revival with my friends, flocked to Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, one of Ramblin’ Jack's notable hangouts, heard Dylan before and after he went electric, and swooned over Joan Baez. I also kept up with the likes of Dave Van Ronk, the Reverend Gary Davis who was blind and played the harmonica as well as the guitar, and Cisco Houston who traveled and recorded with Guthrie, and, like Ramblin’ Jack, felt an affinity for cowboys.

Ramblin’ Jack often dressed like a ranch hand, though at times he also sported bib overalls suitable for a southern sharecropper, and, on other occasions, he wore a shiny black leather jacket and looked like he might have stepped off the set of The Wild One with Brando or Rebel Without a Cause, which, of course, propelled James Dean in to stardom. He adopted a variety of personae.

During my undergraduate days, the pinnacle of every school year was the Newport Folk Festival held under the stars in Newport, Rhode Island, though I also attended other festivals and heard and enjoyed Elizabeth Cotton, a Black musician who had a distinctive style of guitar playing. Then, in 1964, the Beatles came along and folk music mostly receded into the pages of history, at least for me.

Still, I remember that Phil Ochs captured the hopes and dreams of a generation during the War in Vietnam with ballads like ‘I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore’, but Phil’s desire to be as big as Elvis did him in. I met Ochs in Paris in 1970 where he complained to me about the degradation of the American language with hackneyed expressions like ‘dig it’ and ‘groovy’ which punctuated nearly every conversation as spoken by hippies. Ochs was right about that.

Ramblin’ Jack mostly steered clear of overtly political and topical songs of the sort Dylan sang and didn’t aim for fame and fortune. Which is probably why he outlived Ochs and Houston. But he also didn't take the risks that Dylan took.

Aiyana grew up with her father’s ballads and traveled across America with him. Her documentary, which is an homage to a man and his friends, and admirers including Peter Seeger, and a monument to a school – if you can call it that, of American folk music – depicts a daughter and father riding side by side in a vehicle on the way to Elko, Nevada. Their journey together might remind Beat mavens of Jan Kerouac and her strained relationship with her father.

Like Kerouac, Elliott neglected parenthood and domesticity. He married several times, but didn’t stick with any single wife. The road continued to call to him. In Aiyana’s doc, one of Ramblin’ Jack’s friends observes that ‘his brain was out there in the cosmos’ and that he wasn’t good at ‘getting the kids dressed and out to school’. One might say much the same about Kerouac. For both Jacks, ramblin’ meant more than setting down.

Music industry promoters such as Ed Pearl and Harold Leventhal complain to Aiyana about Ramblin’ Jack’s irresponsibility and his inability to be more organized than he was. When adventure called, he obeyed it even if and when he had a concert scheduled and an audience waiting. But he was also pained when he wasn’t initially invited to perform on the stage at Woodstock.

The times had passed him by, but he kept on going and, in the aftermath of Woodstock, he recorded more than half a dozen albums, including South Coast, Friends of Mine, The Long Ride plus The Lost Tapes: Cowes Harbor and The Lost Tapes: Isle of Wight.

Ramblin’ Jack got around. In fact, he toured the UK and Europe in the late 1950s with banjo player Derroll Adams and recorded several albums for Topic. In some ways, England in those days was more receptive to American folk singers than the US, much as France was more receptive to American jazz performers. Folk music was associated with the Left and the US was just emerging from the toxic cloud of McCarthyism. The Weavers were banned and so was Pete Seeger.

My wife Eleanor played guitar and sang folk music in pubs in Manchester, England from 1964 to 1967. I was her roadie, and though I mostly listened and carried her guitar I felt like I was part of the scene. When she sang ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’ as Ramblin’ Jack sang it, I joined in on the chorus: ‘Walking with my baby down by the San Francisco Bay/ Walking with my baby down by San Francisco Bay’.

The Weavers sang it and so did Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan, but I’ve always preferred Ramblin’ Jack’s version which you can hear on his daughter’s film bio. It's worth a listen or two or three.

He didn’t have the ability of Dylan to read the Zeitgeist and express it in songs like ‘Blowing in the Wind’. Nor did he have Dylan’s ability to reinvent himself over and over again, decade after decade. But he has remained true to himself and his values and he has been an artistic survivor for more than six decades, a remarkable achievement in a volatile music universe in which even talented performers such as Phil Ochs don’t go the distance.