Jack's an original...and they don't even make originals like him anymore! Both the myth and the reality of Ramblin' Jack Elliott are important elements of this country's folk legacy.


Joan Baez



Bob Dylan was shooting this movie, and they were shooting in a little room upstairs, above a stable outside of Montreal. I was just hanging around watching them shoot this movie. Harry Dean [Stanton] and Joan Baez were singing a corrido together. Bob noticed me feeling useless and everything.

In one of those moments of directorial genius, or it might have been just some of one of Bob's fuzzy-headed propagations of a little joke, but he didn't warn Harry Dean and Joan that I was going to do this, because they didn't know — they were into the thing. They were singing. They were acting. The cameras were rolling.

Bob whispers to me off on the side, "Take this jacket, Jack, and take this rifle, and you go up to Harry Dean and interrupt him in the next song and tell him, 'Hey Boss,'" (because evidently Harry Dean was playing the part of some Mexican bandito, singing the song to Joan Baez.) He says, "Tell him 'Hey boss, you just traded your horse for this woman and the guy's got the horse and he's leaving town with your horse.' "

Bob gave me this signal. Now Harry Dean and Joan are still in the middle of this corrido that goes on forever: "AIYIYIYI!" They're singing away. I comes traipsing right into the scene.

Jack Elliott

Jack and Joan could be heard in the 1975-1976 Rolling Thunder Review tour, as well as Newport Folk Festivals (available on Vanguard's cd Evening Concerts: Newport Folk Festival 1963 or in the four cd set Vanguard Collector's Edition) and the 1977 Bread & Roses Festival (on Fantasy). Woody Guthrie dedications which included Jack and Joan are the 1968 & 1970 tributes to Woody Guthrie (available on Warner Brothers' cd Tribute to Woody Guthrie: Highlights from Concerts) and The Greatest Songs of Woody Guthrie (on Vanguard.) There are otherwise available selections of Jack & Joan's work included on a broad collection titled Troubadours of the Folk Era, Vol. 1
(on Rhino.)