CD Review: Ramblin' Jack Elliott - I Stand Alone

The title of Ramblin' Jack Elliott's latest album doesn't lie: amongst the traditional folk giants with whom he once ran, Elliott really does stand alone. Woody Guthrie, his mentor and friend, is, of course, long dead; as is their old mutual traveling buddy Cisco Houston. Pete Seeger, who frequently shared the stage with Elliott and counted him as an influence, performs only rarely because of age. And then there's the man whose early persona was so indebted to Ramblin' Jack that his first show saw him billed as the "Son of Jack Elliott" – one Bob Dylan. Needless to say, that particular disciple moved past traditional folk a long time ago.

But Ramblin' Jack has stayed strong, continuing to play the music he learned as an itinerant folkie more than half a century ago. Even as popular attention has shifted to rock and roll, and from rock and roll to hip-hop, he's continued on his own singular path; sometimes with those timeless, dusty-edged, more and more infrequent albums, but more often as a sort of specter, haunting the musical landscape, brightening it piece by piece. Now he's onstage with the Grateful Dead; now he's carousing through America in the modern gypsy caravan that was Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue. He stands alone, but more importantly, he walks alone, too.

So with these things in mind – his massive and persisting influence on Americana, his increasingly solitary role, and not least his age, 75 this year – one might expect I Stand Alone to be a somber meditation on individual and cultural mortality, perhaps something along the lines of Neil Young's recent Heart of Gold film. In a way, it is.

The music Elliott plays, after all, is arguably not even meant to exist in the recorded medium, let alone in the age of iTunes. There's something strange and ancient about these spare, scattershot-brief songs, as if they were recorded in the 1930s by Leadbelly or the Carter Family (or Woody Guthrie), instead of in 2006 with Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker on harmony vocals and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass. And as for the singer's own age, it's all but impossible to ignore, right down to the track listing: "Arthritis Blues," "Remember Me," and "Drivin' Nails in My Coffin."

That said, let's just not belabor the point too much, because if Jack's latest ramble sees him confronting the twilight of his life, it's nowhere near the somber tone of Johnny Cash's last two American records. Instead, I Stand Alone finds Elliott full of fire and even humor, turning rheumatism into a defiant joke with Butch Hawes' "Arthritis Blues" and looking forward to the hereafter as a place to reunite with his beloved dog on Cisco Houston's "Old Blue." Best of all is "Rake & Ramblin' Boy," a traditional tune, which could have been penned by Elliott himself and ends with the cackled monologue, "Now when I die / Don't bury me at all / Just place me away in alcohol / My .44 put by my feet / Tell everyone I'm just asleep."

Article Author: Modern Pea Pod

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