Ramblin' Jack Elliott is a true American original. Born Elliott Charles Adnopoz, the son of a Brooklyn doctor, Jack has since the early 50s personified the footloose, carefree, hitchhiking, sing for your supper troubadour. He is Woody Guthrie's spiritual heir and an early inspiration to two generations of fledgling folkies, including his pal from Greenwich Village days, Bob Dylan. He's a singing cowboy who numbers rodeo stars, range hands, buckaroos, and cowboy poets among his friends and admirers, as well as fellow freethinkers as various as Tom Waits, Robert Duvall, Sam Shepard, and the late Jack Kerouac.

Jack is an airplane pilot, a diesel mechanic, and a salt water sailor. He's rambled to every corner of the United States and most of Europe, and he may just now be coming into his prime. South Coast, his 1996 album on Red House, and his first new studio recording in many years, won a well deserved Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album and has sparked much renewed interest in Jack's recording and performing career. His life is the stuff of legend, a story worthy of the pen of Mark Twain or Jack London.

The legend of Ramblin' Jack began at the age of nine, when he saw his first rodeo, in Madison Square Garden. He returned every year until at age fifteen, he ran away from home and got a job with Colonel Jim Eskew's Rodeo, working as a groom for two dollars a day. He also learned cowboy songs and how to play the banjo from a rodeo clown and a few guitar chords from cowboy Todd Fletcher. Inspired, when he returned home, he found an old guitar and began to practice.

In the early 50s, Jack heard his first Woody Guthrie recording, and like that first trip to the rodeo, it changed his life. He arranged to visit Guthrie's home in Howard Beach, New York, and as Woody's wife has since joked, he came and stayed for two years. Woody saw something in the youngster, and for the next few years, the legend and his disciple were inseparable. They busked around the country, and Jack absorbed as much from his idol as he could, from his repertoire to his singing and picking styles to his speaking mannerisms. It was the beginning of Jack's ramblin' years and the end of Woody's, as the older man was hospitalized in 1954 and gradually succumbed to Huntington's chorea, the disease that led to his death in 1967. Jack, however, continued to ramble, collect stories and perform, carrying Woody's songs and story to ever-widening audiences in the process. He serenaded James Dean in a Hollywood parking lot and he hung out with Jack Kerouac, who read him the as yet unpublished manuscript of On The Road.

In 1955 Jack traveled to Europe, becoming along with singer Derroll Adams, the first American folksinger to busk around the continent. He introduced Woody's songs to a new audience, expanded his own repertoire, and exerted an influence on the continental music scene that continues to this day.

Emerging from Woody's shadow, Jack began to establish his own identity and distinctive performing style. He played for Princess Margaret and influenced a whole generation of musicians from the British Isles.

Jack returned to the states in 1961 just in time for the big folk revival in this country, and he found himself in the center of it. Soon after arriving back in the U. S., Jack's importance to the movement was acknowledged in Newsweek, who called him "one of the few authentic voices" in folk music. Visiting Woody in the hospital, he met Bob Dylan, newly arrived in New York, who soon became to Jack what Jack had been to Woody; a dedicated disciple.

Through the early 60s, Ramblin' Jack played Greenwich Village's legendary folk clubs: The Bitter End, Gerde's Folk City, and The Gaslight, among others. The folk revival was in full swing, and Jack was at its center. As Esquire has said, "For much of the Sixties, it seemed that anyone who picked up an acoustic guitar did so harboring earnest hopes of playing like Mississippi John Hurt and singing like Jack Elliott." He moved to California in 1965, continuing his rambling ways and plying the troubadour's trade. In the mid 70s he joined Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review, playing small concert halls across the country. All the while, continuing until the present time, Ramblin' Jack has played with and influenced two generations of musicians, from peers like Dave Van Ronk to 60s disciples Dylan and Arlo Guthrie to X generation performers such as Beck and John Wesley Harding.

In addition to winning the 1996 Best Traditional Folk Album Grammy, Jack also received the prestigious Bill Graham Lifetime Achievement Award at the Bay Area Music Awards in San Francisco.

Ramblin' Jack recently teamed up with slide guitarist-producer Roy Rogers to record an album of duets and trios with some of his favorite musicians. Roy and Jack have spent the last year working on this landmark project. Artists who have contributed to the project include Arlo Guthrie, Bob Weir, Guy Clark, Emmylou Harris, Nanci Griffith, Tom Waits, Jerry Jeff Walker, John Prine, Peter Rowan, Rosalie Sorrels, and Norton Buffalo. The album is made up entirely of songs that Jack has not previously recorded, including a new song that Tom Waits penned especially for the project. A wonderful air of anticipation surrounds the project as the album nears completion.

Jack is quite possibly at the artistic and creative peak of his career. He continues to collect and pass on stories, to hone his repertoire, and to gain new fans. His friend, the great cowboy poet and singer Buck Ramsey perhaps sums it up best when he says, "One of the great things about listening to Jack over the years is to hear how subtly over time he closes in on a song until he owns it, makes it his own so completely that anyone else performs it at his own peril. A good thorough listening will convince most that the vintage Ramblin' Jack Elliott began about the time he hit sixty a few years back. And he seems to have, perhaps more instinctively than consciously, pared his performing repertoire down to the gather he would have carry him into posterity."