The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack (2000)

Ramblin' Jack Elliott has been many things in the course of a life now nearing the end of its seventh decade: trucker, sailor, cowboy, storyteller, ladies man, eccentric, iconoclast, and a folksinger-guitarist who's considered the link between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. What he hasn't been is much of a father, and that becomes the poignant focus of this documentary directed, written, coproduced, and narrated by his daughter, Aiyana. The film includes plenty of material (home movies, performance footage both old and new, interviews with friends, family, and Elliott himself, etc.) about Elliott's life, and a remarkable life it's been.

Born Elliot Charles Adnopoz in 1931, son of a Jewish doctor from Brooklyn, he left home to become a cowboy, eventually becoming Guthrie's protégé and a minor legend in his own right who was well-known in England in the '50s and on the scene during the early '60s folk boom in New York. His own irresponsibility and lack of ambition and focus kept him from being a bigger name, and those are the same flaws that have afflicted his relationship with his daughter. "I can't remember having an actual conversation with my dad," Aiyana says, and by the end of the film that still seems to be the case. In what may be the most telling moment here, she asks her mother (one of Elliott's four wives) if Ramblin' Jack "had any talents as a father." What follows is a long, bemused pause... and no response at all. A fascinating document, but not one that you'd call uplifting. --Sam Graham Amazon.com

The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack

I thought this was an excellent retelling of R. Jack's life, music, and family...Lots of vintage videos of the beginning of the folk music and it's effect on us all February 19, 2008

American Original

I guess I've been listening to Ramblin' Jack most of my life, beginning with some old Library of Congress LPs that my folks had lying around the house. Jack's wailing delivery of "Diamond Joe" sticks in my head like a good shot of malt liquor. As I watched this film and mulled over his old recordings, I couldn't help thinking that it's tough to separate the man from the myth. I suppose you can't blame him for capitalizing on his early association with Dylan, and the film makes sly reference to Jack's alleged influence on Dylan's music. He played with just about everybody who was anybody during the Great Folk Music Scare of the 1960s. Part poseur and part American original, he has come to represent everything that American folk-roots music stands for. Singer-songwriter Guy Clark's Workbench Songs (a 2006 Grammy nominee beaten by none other than Dylan himself) contains a recording of "Diamond Joe" dedicated to Ramblin' Jack. Like Clark, I can't help but feel respect and affection for the guy despite his bad pipes and his occasional hyperbole. April 7, 2007

Where did Dylan come from

It was easy to see where Bob Dylan got his style and roots. It really all stems from Woody Guthrie. Elliot lived and learned from Woody and later so do did Dylan. The documentary is a bit amateurish, director is his daughter, but somehow it works due to Elliots charisma. Any hoo, if you like to know where the folk scene started...........here is tis! July 14, 2006

I flew from Vermont to Mill Valley, CA to see him

Ramblin' Jack is as he always was, can't seem to finish a song without a story in the middle. The link between Woody Guthrie and his family with whom he stayed and is close with and also Arlo and he perform together. Too bad Bob Dylan can't remember how he got where he came from and who gave him the step up. Jack is right up there with our national treasures though the tape is not too professional. Would have loved to have known him when he was a young scamp. May 25, 2006

For us old folkies, this footage is impressive...

I've been a casual Jack Elliott fan for about 45 years now, since shortly after I discovered Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston and their generation of singers and pickers and songwriters. Jack represents the succeeding generation, one step ahead of Dylan and Baez and Ochs and Paxton, et. al. Jack was taught by Woody and lived with his family and traveled with Guthrie during the final year or two that Woody was healthy enough to travel. This is a personal film by Jack's only child, a daughter who was in effect, abandoned by her father so he could pursue his demons, including a folksinging career that hardly ever made him any money. We see some great archival footage here of Woody performing with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, of Jack on the Johnny Cash and Pete Seeger TV shows, of the early Dylan, of Odetta, and several others. There is a lot of video of Jack, late in life, still out there on small stages for small wages. Elliott avoided making records for about 20 years, but in the 1990's he put out three CD's of songs and stories which, while not masterpieces, are worth owning if you love his era and his style. I enjoyed the film much more than I thought I would. It is true that Jack is revealed as a near-totally absent father, who still cannot connect on a conversationally intimate level with his now adult child. He is a bit self-absorbed, a compulsive talker off the stage whose subjects get old, even to his best friends. He had some drug and drink woes in mid-career as well. However, he is a survivor, a link to the post-WW II folksinging revivalists who never enjoyed the money and acclaim that the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Dylan and others received. Without Woody, and Pete, and The Weavers, and Cisco, and Jack, however, the ones who followed and who made it big would not have had the songs, and styles, to copy and to make more commercial. "The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack" is a bittersweet experience by the end, for Jack goes on being "Ramblin' Jack" and his daughter, who made the movie, goes on being frustrated at not getting to know what made her father do what he did. March 19, 2006

More reviews at Amazon.com ...