The Songs and Guitar of Ramblin' Jack Elliott
HOMESPUN
Taught By Ramblin' Jack Elliott.
Level 3
80-minute DVD or VHS, includes tab
Hosted by Arlo Guthrie

This lesson captures a fascinating musical exchange between two icons of American folk music as they reminisce, sing songs, and talk about the various influences on Jack’s singular guitar style.

Jack and Arlo discuss Jack’s formative days and the first songs he learned when he ran away from home to join a rodeo. Then they proceed through many of the blues, ballads and cowboy songs that form his rich repertoire. Jack and Arlo play songs of Jack’s many musical heroes, including Arlo’s dad Woody Guthrie (his major influence), Cisco Houston, Lead Belly, Rev. Gary Davis, Brownie McGhee, Tim Hardin, Libba Cotton, Johnny Cash and others.

Our split-screen cameras are there to capture Jack’s guitar technique as he plays through some of his best-known songs, allowing you to see up-close how he creates the guitar arrangements that make up his unique style. Jack demonstrates several traditional guitar standards, fingerpicking Railroad Bill, Freight Train, Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out and Candy Man, and using country-style flatpicking on Take Me Back and Try Me One More Time, Cup of Coffee, The Cuckoo and Hard Travelin’. Jack adds flatpicking blues licks to San Francisco Bay Blues, Poor Howard, Blind Lemon and Black Snake Moan, while Woody’s Talking Sailor utilizes a rolling three-finger strum. Jack tunes his guitar to double dropped D tuning (DBGDAD) for his fingerstyle arrangement of Tim Hardin’s If I Were a Carpenter.

About Ramblin' Jack Elliot
Ramblin’ Jack is a true American legend whose career parallels the growth of the American folk music boom from the early 1950s, when he first "rambled" around the country with Woody Guthrie. He was a major influence on a young Bob Dylan in New York's Greenwich Village, along with everyone he's ever befriended in almost 70 years, including Jack Nicholson, Robert Duvall, Janis Joplin, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Jack Kerouac, Mick Jagger - and just about everyone who ever picked up a folk guitar.
"[Elliott] definitely was the link between Guthrie and what we're playing now," says singer/songwriter Joe Ely. "He was definitely that catalyst. Without him, there would be a vastly different music scene." Newsweek called him "one of the few authentic voices in folk music."

In his long career he has recorded more than 50 albums and garnered numerous awards, including a Grammy and the Bill Graham Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1998 President Clinton recognized Elliott for his influence by presenting him with a National Medal Of Arts, calling him an “American treasure” in a ceremony held at The White House. Recently, Jack was the subject of a critically acclaimed documentary film, “The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack.”