Ramblin' Jack Elliott Plays Felton

(Article published in today's Santa Cruz Sentinel)

Legendary folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliottt has been making music and traveling the world sharing his songs for more than five decades now—and at age 77, he shows no signs of slowing down. Having befriended and played with everybody from Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash to Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson, Elliott has influenced multiple generations of songwriters and musicians and won many awards along the way, including the National Medal of the Arts, presented by President Bill Clinton in 1998.

Born and raised in New York City, Elliott became fascinated with cowboys after seeing a rodeo at Madison Square Garden as a young boy. Unhappy with school and the prospects he was facing in the city, he ran away from home at age 15 and after hitchhiking out of the area, he ended up joining a rodeo—a stint that lasted just a few months, but it gave him his first exposure to folk music, courtesy of the rodeo’s resident musical clown.

“When I got home from that trip I found an old guitar in the closet and started playing some of those songs that I heard him singing, which were mostly hillbilly songs—they didn’t call it country-western at that time.”

After honing his playing skills while listening to radio stations that broadcast western music, Elliott discovered the burgeoning folk music scene in Greenwich Village, and eventually befriended Woody Guthrie, for a time moving in with the Guthrie family, soaking up as much musical knowledge as he could from the seminal writer of “This Land Is Your Land.”

On a road trip across the country with his mentor, Elliott discovered that the power of Guthrie’s songs and the messages he conveyed through them did not sit well with certain portions of the American population, even in his home state.

“A lot of the good people in Oklahoma loved Woody Guthrie and were very proud of him, but there was another large element of Guthrie haters—he narrowly escaped with his life after we stopped at a café in Okemah for a cup of coffee.”

Fifty years on, Elliott continues to travel and play with a fiercely independent spirit gleaned from his heroes, and he comes to Don Quixote’s on Wednesday supporting his latest album, A Stranger Here (Anti Records), which has been receiving rave reviews from fans and critics alike since its’ release this past April. The 10 tracks that make up the album are all cover songs; the collection is comprised of not folk, but pre-war and Depression-era blues tunes by artists such as Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Reverend Gary Davis.

Elliott actually played with and met some of these blues masters when he was an up and coming young troubadour in the early 1960s, such as an encounter he had with Mississippi John Hurt at the Newport Folk Festival.

“He admired my Martin guitar—he had a kind of inexpensive guitar that he owned, and he asked me if I would mind letting him use my guitar. I said ‘You sure can, I’d be honored for you to play my guitar.’ He took it with a big ear to ear smile, and said, ‘Thank you, if they calls you for it, I’ll give it back to you, if they calls me for it, you give it back to me.’ Kind of hard to figure out what that means,” Elliott laughs. “But it all worked out.”

Even though the songs were written several generations ago, their melodies and messages still resonate with modern audiences, which Elliott attributes to a few key facts.

“It’s direct, it’s very simple, it’s undeniably true and it’s kind of rough— I think it appeals to people that must be tired of all the phony B.S. that’s so popular in music now.”



If You Go:

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
Wednesday
July 22
7:30 p.m.
$18-$20
Don Quixote’s International Music Hall
6275 Highway 9
Felton
(831) 603-2294
www.donquixotesmusic.info