The_Film_Cricket Rambling Jack Elliott could not have earned himself a more fitting nickname. Lord, he was born a rambling man, but a man who rambles too much is a man that you can't pin down. He was a folk singer, a man whose soul could whip up the most heartfelt music you ever heard, yet he never seems to have had a commitment to anything.The documentary "The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack" is very much about what kept his career from taking off. Directed and narrated by his daughter Aiyana – from his fourth marriage – the film is a personal essay mostly from her point of view about what it was like growing up the child of a man who never seemed to have an organized thought in mind. In his music, as in life he rambled and rambled and rambled.In the 50s and early 60s he came up alongside Woody Guthrie and a budding young singer named Robert Allen Zimmerman (who you know as Bob Dylan). He knew them both well, but somehow those two had a better plan in life and in their music. During a tribute concert for Guthrie following his death in 1967, Dylan was a headliner but Elliott was left off the program. As time went on, he would watch both men become legends, while he became a footnote, seen only as a meager thread between the end of Guthrie and the beginning of Dylan. Reading a review of his own career, Elliott – still alive at 82 - blows the paper a satisfied raspberry.He was born in Brooklyn in 1931 as Elliott Charles Adnopoz, a doctor's son who ran away from home at an early age to join up with the rodeo. He had a deep passion for the cowboy life and, despite his origins made his own image as the kind of folk singer whose music was the cry of the wounded. He rambled from one thing to the next and just kept right on rambling. That was the problem, the rambles kept him from finding a foothold in the industry. Late in the film, one of his managers laments that "I respected his talent, but he was too disorganized." We can see that early on in a clip from his appearance on The Johnny Cash Show as Elliott befuddles his fellow players – and even Cash himself – as he can't quite decide on which key to begin.It's hard to know where to stand with this documentary because you become so fixated on the fact that it was Elliott that killed his own career. He rambled on and rambled on, never finding a place for himself. By the end, you wonder if he liked frustrating those around him, or if his mind blew from one thing to the next just like his music.

balfund Until I saw this film, I'd never seen Jack Elliott "in concert." I've seen Dylan, many times; see Arlo Guthrie once a year when he plays Harrisburg, Pa., with his daughter Sara; saw Dave Van Ronk when he played here a couple of years ago with Rosemary Sorrels; never saw Jack Elliott. Until now.And what a concert. No back-up singers; no jazz; no fancy lighting; no special effects. Just Jack Elliott, playing and singing and talking about his life and his times and his adventures, picking away on his guitar for punctuation, singing deep and throaty about where's he's been, who he is and making fun at a lot of ideas about what other people think he means. No apologies; no excuses; a living tribute to what Henry Ford II once said: never complain, never explain.It's hard to believe that this film was made by his daughter. It's a true, genuine, open statement about a man who has lived his life with absolutely no plan in mind about what he would do or say or where his choices would take him or what effect it would have on other people or things, but never hesitated to follow his heart, follow his curiosity, outrun his shadow with every step. Pick up and leave; pick up and go; never look back and never let go. Never stop working, never stop playing, take every breath and every encounter and every day and tell other people about it on a guitar. Invite them in for dinner and some stories while sitting on a barstool. That's Jack Elliott in concert. It almost sounds as if his life has been selfish and self-serving, but this film clearly makes the distinction between living a life of greed, which is what drives selfish people, and having a sense of self, which is what Jack Elliott has worked on and what he devoted himself to and has shared with us through his music. He meant no harm; he has always just been looking.The film evolves into a masterpiece of objectivity despite the potential for the obvious pitfall of a daughter trying to understand her father and asking the whole world to watch with her while she searches. What courage. She's made of the same stuff her father is and this "road trip" they took together is made singularly more sweet because they invited all of us along with them.Folk music is all about the stories, recording people and events musically, in common terms and without the frills, just straight up stories. And this film tells a great story and in the telling, has itself become a story.My sons and I are going to a Bob Dylan concert on August 16th. I'm bringing a tape of this film to them to watch before the concert. Music helps us understand who we are, where we've been and where we're headed. Having seen this film, I'm going to listen to Dylan with a whole new set of ears. And I've been listening to him for forty years.This film is an important guidepost in the history of American folk music because it gives us the life's work and "ramblings", up front and on a personal level, of a true American folk legend.

austex23 Ramblin' Jack's story is in many ways the story of American music in the 20th Century, and this documentary tells that story with vitality from the unique perspective of a daughter trying to come to terms with her father's family-excluding career. As such, it may be a tad too ambitious, but the result is certainly entertaining and as personal and powerful a picture of an artist as I can remember seeing. Largely without pretension and careful to get a variety of perspectives, the film provides a faceted view of an evasive subject. The historic documents - a shot of young Zimmerman in the crowd at a Ramblin' Jack show, rare film of roots artists, home movies - are just amazing, and the interviews with the Guthrie clan and other survivors of the 50s folkie era are illuminating. The film's secondary story - the daughter's quest for understanding of her dad - may not be everyone's cup of coffee, but it worked for me, putting a human frame around an epic life.Mostly, the film awakened for me that sense of endless possibility in mid-20th Century America, before the mass packaging of culture crushed so much of the country's promise. Folk was a musical movement born in backwaters and the public squares of melting pot cities, of the fusion of cultures - black and rural, diverse and rich as the world - into the raw stuff of entertainment. Jack's life echoes Kerouac and the Beats in his quest for experience, and his role as Woody Guthrie's heir-designate puts him square in the heart of American radical politics, though those politics largely seem to have evaded Jack's attention. Jack's identification and fascination with cowboy music establishes a link to American myth and the dreams of a decade that yearned for the freedom of boundless frontiers while established powers did their best to suppress cultural deviance. Jack's life, his persistence today, and the small but vital subculture of his heirs - guys like Tom Russell and Steve Earle - attest to the ornery survival of essential difference in a world that punishes nonconformity

simuland Of general interest due to Ramblin' Jack Elliott's role in creating the archetype of the American folk music hero, given tangible historic expression in his serving as the link between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, specifically, as the model for the latter's original stage persona. Elliott, fashioning himself after, as protégé of, Guthrie, was one of the first to imagine and create the role of the American minstrel from which innumerable others have borrowed and to this day continue to borrow.This film would have been infinitely more interesting without the first-person intrusion of the film maker, Elliott's daughter, who from the start sets out to have that one heart-to-heart with her daddy she never had; she almost makes herself the subject of this film, but who would see it if she were? The daughter-in-search-of-father theme interferes not only with the objectivity of this biography of folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott (1931-present), but it disrupts the chronological depiction of events: the film jumps confusingly between recent and distant past to accommodate the daughter's story, which includes redundant home-movie footage of her as a child. Does the world really need one more egocentric female narrative of the parent-that-never-was, of familial "dysfunction"? Bookstore shelves and the rolls of indie films are already overfilled with every conceivable variant of this bourgeois American-woman self-preoccupation. This domestic mindset is so pervasive that I suspect its root cause is the feminist parochialism of university writing and film departments in which these women were initially "empowered." And/or is this the self-pitying cultural legacy of psychoanalysis? (Faulkner: "motherblood with hate loves and cohabits.")Yes, Ramblin' Jack was a lousy parent, always absent, on the road. Anyone who expected otherwise had to have been totally impervious to who and what he was. The very qualities that make him special, for which he is prized and loved, namely, his unspoiled childlike sense of wonder, the freshness and simplicity of his vision, his offbeat folky genuineness, all arise from the fact that Elliott from the first refused to grow up, that he willfully turned his back on the world of adult responsibility and conventional adult social identities, choosing, instead, to live out the fantasy of the cowboy troubadour, literally running away from his Brooklyn home to join the rodeo at the age of 16. Was this in reaction to the anhedonia of his Jewish parents, the echo of the holocaust in modern America? His mother (we are told) was a driven, unpleasant woman who wanted Jack to be a doctor just like his father, who (we are told) was an aloof workaholic. Elliott Adnopoz--Jack's real name--obviously rebelled against being force fed the conventional American dream, sought instead bohemian outlet in the romanticism of the American frontier, the American West.Unlike Louis Prima: The Wildest, which was redeemed from its adulatory distortions by ample actual footage of its subject performing, this film mercilessly cuts into Ramblin' Jack's performances to editorialize on his failings and vent his daughter's frustrations. Still, because Elliott's life intersected so deeply and so often the currents of American folk and pop music, we are inevitably given a backstage glimpse of that larger, more important drama. His journeys encompassed the cultural suffocation of the Eisenhower years, the skiffle movement and origins of rock music in England, the American folk renaissance of the 60's, and the hippie culture of the West Coast. Alan Lomax, Dave van Ronk, Arlo and sister Nora Guthrie, Odetta, Kris Kristofferson, and Pete Seeger all check in with impressions and recollections of Jack. One could only wish that Aiyana Elliott could have imbued her film with more of her father's casual charm, his gentle whimsiness. The heavy hand of this author makes one appreciate all the more Errol Morris, whose documentaries tell themselves without even the voice of a narrator.