He was a passionate singer who later introduced ‘We Shall Overcome.’”īy the time he returned to New York City, Elliott had matured into a solid performer. He later started the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago where they teach five-string banjo and guitar picking. Frank was 17 and played banjo like a wizard. “We were meeting real hillbillies, sometimes sleeping overnight in their homes up in the Smoky Mountains. Farmers would take their hats off, shaking each other down, and collect money for us,” he recalls. That summer he and a pair of friends and fellow musicians, Frank Hamilton and Guy Carawan, traveled by car from New York City to New Orleans, with his Gretsch in tow. That stirred my desire to hit the road myself.” Over three days sitting on the floor and drinking six big bottles of red wine, we all took turns reading from it. “He’d come to her apartment and read to us his manuscript of On the Road. “In 1953, I met Jack Kerouac, a friend of my girlfriend at the time,” he says. June (left) and Ramblin' Jack Elliott at Waterloo Station in London (Image credit: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images) “I wasn’t known yet,” he explains, “just Woody’s sidekick.” Elliott would eventually come into his own, but he needed to do some living.
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He’d been through several previous guitars that were full of holes, wrecked, cracked, and bent.”Įlliott lived with Guthrie from 1951 to 1953, but performed with him only once, as a guest at a concert in Newark. He always teased me about the piece of junk my Gretsch was.
Somebody requested, ‘Blue Tail Fly.’ He said, ‘That’s a Burl Ives song. He charged five cents per, like a human jukebox. “When I arrived, Woody was in an upstairs closet tuning his guitar and warming up,” he says. He reconnected with Guthrie at a party in the Village. Three months later, Elliott was back in New York City and performing under the name Buck Elliott. Even now, I don’t remember how the words were or sounded. I couldn’t remember it five minutes later. Thoughts and feelings came out about Woody being sick in the hospital. “Strumming along on guitar, I improvised a song, just part of our conversation. “Something about Dean reminded me of Woody,” he says. In California, he met then-aspiring actor James Dean, the ex-boyfriend of Elliott’s bride-to-be, June. He took the guitar with him to visit Guthrie and again soon after when he and a school chum made a trek to California in the friend’s Plymouth Coupe. I visited Woody there two days running.”īy this point Elliott had acquired a slightly shopworn Gretsch guitar for $75 from a music store on lower Third Avenue. The first time I met him he was lying in bed. I got a bellyache.’ It turned out he had a ruptured appendix. Guthrie invited him over before calling it off.
“Paley gave me his phone number,” he says. “His girlfriend was Tiny Ledbetter, Lead Belly’s niece.”Ī turning point came in 1951 when Elliott met his kindred spirit, Woody Guthrie. “Fred played Lead Belly songs on a 12-string guitar,” he recalls. “Some kids even clapped.” Roy Acuff was his first singing influence, followed by Gene Autry, the Louvin Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, and Lonnie Johnson, whom Elliott would eventually meet at Gerde’s Folk City in the Village in 1961.ĭuring the summers of 19, Elliott played in Washington Square Park with budding folk artists Tom Paley, Erik Darling, Harry Smith, Roger Sprung, and Fred Gerlach. “I’d bring it to school and played for my fellow students on the front stoop, singing cowboy songs,” he recalls. His old Collegiate emerged from the closet. Three months later he was back home, but, perhaps stirred by his time on the road, Elliott’s passion for the guitar began to flourish. I played some banjo but never got good at it.” We had a rodeo clown, Brahmer Rogers, who played hillbilly songs on guitar and banjo. “I’d sleep in a tent with 60 horses three feet from their hind feet,” he says. “I suggested we hitchhike to Chicago to hear Bunk Johnson’s jazz band.”Īlong the way Elliott made a detour and, while passing through Washington, D.C., took a job grooming saddle horses with Jim Eskew’s Ranch Rodeo and Wild West Show. “We’d drink beer in a subterranean bar, near what became the Gaslight on MacDougal Street,” he says. His wanderlust inspired by a friendship with a local Danish sailmaker, Elliott ran away from home with his friends, “future beatnik poets” Don Finkel and Carl Margolies, in April 1947, when he was 15. Ramblin' Jack Elliott, with his wife June (left), playing the guitar at an event in Stratford, London, circa 1960 (Image credit: John Pratt/Keystone Features/Getty Images)
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