Ramblin' Jack Elliott
Born Elliott Charles Adnopoz to a Brooklyn physician, Ramblin' Jack Elliott ran off as a teenager to join a traveling rodeo before teaching himself guitar and finding his way to Woody Guthrie, whose 'talkin'' style, repertoire, and wandering ethos he absorbed so completely that Guthrie's own son Arlo recalled his father saying Elliott 'sounds more like me than I do.' Elliott carried that inheritance through 1950s Greenwich Village and London folk clubs, cutting albums for Topic Records and becoming, by his own reputation, the walking archive who first showed a young Bob Dylan how to sound like Guthrie. He later rode with Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, won a Grammy for 1995's 'South Coast,' and received the National Medal of Arts in 1998 — recognition for a career spent as folk music's most important errand-runner.
we haven’t charted Ramblin' Jack Elliott yet
this stretch of the river isn’t mapped. we trace the watershed one artist at a time — and we’re always heading further upstream.