The last cowboy on earth has an answering machine, but like any lawless, drifting icon, his tape is full.
So, if you want to reach him, you have to call back a few times. But when he does finally get around to picking up the telephone, he answers as if he was expecting your call all day. And with a booming, gravelly voice he nearly sings his salutation: “Why hello there, this is Ramblin’ Jack.”
That’s Ramblin’ Jack Elliott—the 82-year-old Grammy winner and National Medal of Arts winner who has recorded more than 40 folk albums and has been performing around the world for nearly 70 years. He is what one might call a national treasure.
He’s called Johnny Cash a close friend, Bob Dylan his son and apprentice, and he went on to become the protege and carry on the legacy of Woody Guthrie after the folk luminary died in the late 1960s. And while busking on a train platform in the United Kingdom in the 1950s, his singing reached the ears of a schoolboy named Mick Jagger—who readily admits to this day that the moment directly inspired him to pursue music.
Elliott is a cowboy who ran away from a career in medicine and the bright lights of New York City to join a traveling rodeo when he was 15.
“I didn’t want to have anything to do with that life,” he says. “I wanted to be a cowboy or a sailor or maybe even a trucker—that would have made me happy, driving across the country. Then I met a great fella, a singing rodeo clown, and that was it for me.”
He’s been on the road ever since, rarely resting his head long enough to call anywhere home. And he’s exceedingly polite and lives up to his “Ramblin'” nickname by tackling the simplest questions with meandering, jaw-dropping tales of legendary friends and chance meetings, including one with James Dean.
Before Dean hit fame, Elliott, at the behest of a girl both of the men dated, spontaneously serenaded the soon-to-be star while he sat in a white Porsche convertible with a stunning beauty outfitted with “white hair and a white fur coat.” And despite vying for the attention of the same woman, Elliott never got jealous, and the two men became fast friends.
“Jimmy was a great guy. I still miss him … What did you ask, again?” he says, laughing. “Sorry, I go on from time to time.”
I had asked him if he was surprised by his own life—it seems unbelievable, like a
“Like a dream?” he says. “Sometimes I can’t tell where the dream begins and where my life takes over. It’s been a hell of a ride, and I’ve been all over the world.”
That includes Baton Rouge, where he returns June 19 to play the Red Dragon Listening Room with Kristin Diable as the opener. The last time he played the venue, owner Chris Maxwell remembers, they couldn’t get him off the stage.
“The man has endless energy. I’ve never seen anything like it—especially someone his age,” Maxwell says. “And the crowd loved it. They stayed with him until the end. The next day, he called me and said, Hey, that was great. People don’t love me like this anymore.'”
Eliott meant it. He thinks crowds in the South, especially in the Deep South, have a genuine appreciation for folk music. They love singers, he says, because Southerners grow up singing.
“I told that fella that I had the time of my life,” Eliott says. “And that I would come back. I told him that again and again, so here I come.”
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott plays the Red Dragon Listening Room June 19 with Kristin Diable opening. reddragonlr.com
Tracks to get you ready for the show: “Muleskinner Blues,” “Railroad Bill”
