Ramblin’ Jack

Elliottt Ramblin Jack Elliott was born Elliot Charles Adnopoz to a well-known surgeon and his wife on August 1, 1931, in Brooklyn, New York. After seeing a rodeo at Madison Square Garden as a youngster, Elliott decided that he wanted to be a cowboy. Several years later he left home and took a job as a horse groomer while learning to ride, talk, and sing like his rodeo heroes. By the time he reached adult-hood, Elliott played guitar well enough to make a little money imitating the folk style he heard on the radio from the great American folksinger Woody Guthrie, who gained fame in 1940 with the release of Dust Bowl Ballads, an album of songs about his experiences as a teenager during the dusty depression years in Texas and Oklahoma. In 1951 the young Elliott paid Guthrie the first of many visits. Guthrie’s mentoring of Elliott affected American folk music for an entire generation.

In the late 1950s and into the 1960s Elliott honed his stage presence and songwriting abilities while living in England and traveling across Europe. His music combined blues and cowboy songs, interspersed with lots of talking. The British loved Elliott, and musicians there (including Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger) were influenced heavily by his style. By the time he returned to the United States, Elliott had his own American students, including a young Bob Dylan. Like most fans, Dylan thought Jack was an authentic American cowpoke. As one Elliott biographer put it, this was to change: “Eventually Dylan learned that Jack's real background mirrored his own, which Bob had also been busy concealing: middle-class Jewish kids Elliott Adnopoz and Robert Zimmerman escaped academia to follow the image of Woody Guthrie.”

In our time, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott is still singing, and blowing fans away with his ability to tell a story his own way.

1. Listen to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s version of Woody Guthrie’s “Talkin’ Columbia.” When Guthrie wrote “Them folks back east doing a lot of talkin’/Some of them balkin’, some of them squawkin’/With all their figurin’ and all their books/ Well they just didn’t know them Royal Chinooks” he was referring to the construction of dams on the Columbia River, which interfered with the natural migrations of salmon. Who were “the folks back East”? What are the environmental and social legacies of the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams today? What do you imagine are some possible futures for the salmon and for the dams? Are there any articles in your newspaper or your newspaper archives concerning dams and fisheries in the West?

2. How does Ramblin Jack Elliott’s life story—that of a Jewish child from Brooklyn who grows up to become one of America’s most loved cowboy folk singers—help you redefine your own notion of what is “truly” or “really” Western?

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