The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
by Aiyana Elliott
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: D.A. Pennebaker, Dave Van Ronk, Harold Leventhal, Jack Elliott (III), Kris KristoffersonDirector: Aiyana Elliott
Brand: UNIVERSAL MUSIC VIDEO DIST.
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Unknown
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 112 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-05-08
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Model: WHE73134
Studio: Winstar
Product features:
- adventures into his life that he seems more myth than man. After running away to join the rodeo at the age of fifteen, he traveled and sang with Woody Guthrie and became friend and mentor to Bob Dylan. His music helped ignite a folk revolution in thei'60s and has influenced some of the most popular musicians and performers of our day. Jack's daughter Aiyana had originally wanted to docu
Movie Reviews of The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
Movie Review: This Man is Your Land
Summary: 5 Stars
First of all - if you live outside of the U.S. and Canada, ignore Amazon[.com]'s claim that this is a Region 1 CD. It's Region 0 or Region Free if you will, and it plays beautifully anywhere in the world. Yes, it really does play beautifully. If you find any joy whatsoever in American folk or country music and you're interested in both the people as well as the music side of things, there probably isn't a DVD anywhere you'll appreciate owning more. There are white folk and country musicians galore in the U.S., but Ramblin' Jack Elliott is a step apart from all of them. Why? Well, he's the real thing. When we think of other names associated with white folk music - Pete Seeger, maybe, or over on the other much more commercial end of things, folks like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary, they all were great talents who reproduced folk music, not people who sang the songs they lived. Please don't interpret this as a bad shot at these folks. One thinks of Studs Terkel's introduction at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival: "Whenever you see a young banjo player anywhere in the country, with a banjo waist high, head back, Adam's apple bobbing, you can say like Kilroy, Pete Seeger has been there." That's one legacy in American folk music, one of a great man who went forth, learned the songs of his land and brought them to us. Our debt to Pete Seeger is great. Ramblin' Jack Elliott is the other side of that coin. He went out and learned the land and then learned to sing its songs but as an expression of his own life. He made the land his own, thus, by their very nature, the songs too became his own, although he wrote nary a one of them. This wonderful story of America singing out through one of its really great bards, minstrels and troubadours is joyous indeed. There are of course some other points made to a lesser extent in the film and to a greater extent in the promotional material. It's true that Ramblin' Jack spent five years on the road with his mentor, Woody Guthrie, and that Bobby Zimmermann aka Bob Dylan spent a good bit of time with his mentor, Ramblin' Jack. People like to raise Dylan's name in connection with this film, although it's largely irrelevant. Ramblin' Jack handles the idea himself in a black-and-white interview from the 1960s, when Dylan still was new on the block: "Hell, I've been singin' like Bob Dylan for 20 years now." The film was made by Ramblin' Jack's daughter Aiyana, and much is made of daughter's search for her father, but that really isn't the focal point of the film. That is the big slice of America that Ramblin' Jack is and was. If think you know Woody Guthrie's song "This Land is Your Land," take a good look at this film. Afterward, you'll understand it much better. With Ramblin' Jack in mind, you might even switch the lyrics a bit: "This Man is Your Land ..."
Summary of The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
BALLAD OF RAMBLIN JACK - DVD MovieRamblin' Jack Elliott has been many things in the course of a life now nearing the end of its seventh decade: trucker, sailor, cowboy, storyteller, ladies man, eccentric, iconoclast, and a folksinger-guitarist who's considered the link between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. What he hasn't been is much of a father, and that becomes the poignant focus of this documentary directed, written, coproduced, and narrated by his daughter, Aiyana. The film includes plenty of material (home movies, performance footage both old and new, interviews with friends, family, and Elliott himself, etc.) about Elliott's life, and a remarkable life it's been.
Born Elliot Charles Adnopoz in 1931, son of a Jewish doctor from Brooklyn, he left home to become a cowboy, eventually becoming Guthrie's protégé and a minor legend in his own right who was well-known in England in the '50s and on the scene during the early '60s folk boom in New York. His own irresponsibility and lack of ambition and focus kept him from being a bigger name, and those are the same flaws that have afflicted his relationship with his daughter. "I can't remember having an actual conversation with my dad," Aiyana says, and by the end of the film that still seems to be the case. In what may be the most telling moment here, she asks her mother (one of Elliott's four wives) if Ramblin' Jack "had any talents as a father." What follows is a long, bemused pause... and no response at all. A fascinating document, but not one that you'd call uplifting. --Sam Graham
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