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- 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.)
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