Ramblin' Jack Elliott: The Never-Ending Highway (review)

Sometimes stories of "also ran" figures are more compelling than stories of "winners," and sometimes being an "also ran" is a sufficient accomplishment in itself. As Hank Reineke tells, the life of American folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott is just that, the story of a man known to the larger public, if at all, more for his associations and friends than for his many accomplishments. Good friend to generations of American and British folk and roots musicians such as Pete Seeger, Ewan MacColl, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, John Prine, and Emmylou Harris, Jack is most famous for his close friendship with his primary mentor, Woody Guthrie, and for the role he in turn played influencing a generation of musicians including Guthrie's son Arlo and Bob Dylan.

Reineke, who assisted as a research consultant for Elliott's daughter, Aiyana Elliott, during the making of her documentary film The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack (2000), has written articles on American popular music for Aquarian Arts Weekly, East Coast Rocker, Blues Revue, and ISIS (the Bob Dylan Magazine). Ramblin' Jack Elliott: The Never-Ending Highway, Reineke's first book, traces Elliott—who was notoriously difficult to locate, let alone chronicle—throughout his life and long career. Reineke reveals that the book is built around the recordings Elliott made between 1954 and 2009 and that "there is purposefully little gossip or retelling of famously tall tales, real and apocryphal, to be found in this book" (p. xviii). While the book would have undoubtedly been made more colorful with the addition of more gossip and anecdotal Ramblin' Jack tales, Reineke, using hundreds of pre-existing articles and interviews, has written an engaging and comprehensive record of his life nonetheless.

Ramblin' Jack's tale is the quintessential American story of a man who created himself in the image he wanted—an image that didn't necessarily correspond to the life into which he was born. Born Elliot Charles Adnopoz, Ramblin' Jack may have been the son of a Brooklyn surgeon, but he seems to have ridden straight out of the cowboy west. Reineke's biography begins appropriately at the 1940 World Championship Rodeo in Madison Square Garden, where interest in the cowboy was cemented into the nine-year-old Elliot Adnopoz. Fascination with the cowboy life would lead him to run away from home at age sixteen to join a traveling rodeo and to a life-long love of the rodeo, the cowboy life, and the songs of the cowboy.

He taught himself to accompany his singing on guitar and at the age of seventeen landed right in the middle of the folk revival then burgeoning in Greenwich Village. Perhaps the American folk music scene was just very small at that time, perhaps it was particularly concentrated in New York, or perhaps Elliott was amazingly fortunate and persistent, but the list of American folk music and popular culture luminaries Elliott met there is simply amazing. The reader cannot help but be impressed by the wide range of celebrities Elliott meets and befriends throughout his life, and comparison is inevitable between Elliott and fictional characters who stumble through life bumping into great numbers of famous historical characters. By the time the nineteen-year-old Elliott met Woody Guthrie, he already knew many of the biggest names of the folk music revival. Through his friendship and apprenticeship with Guthrie, he came to know many more.

Surprisingly, Elliott actually launched his career and may have left his most enduring legacy in Great Britain. Having arrived there with a new bride and the names of a few music contacts right at the height of the skiffle craze (roughly comparable to the American folk music revival), Elliott was soon making albums, singing in London clubs, and performing in the play The Big Rock Candy Mountain at the Theatre Royal in London's East End. His music appealed to many in Great Britain who were interested in American folk music, but "put off...