Ramblin' Jack Elliott's Pickin' and Grinning

Just listened to Ramblin' Jacks Vanguard years. This is folk music at its best. Jack is quite deft on his guitar picking. He uses the thumb to control the bass notes. I had thought that he would do more picking the harmony out with his thumb, but he doesn't. He's 'adoin' a plenty to get tons of thumb pickin' bass runs on virtually every song. There is no way you could call his style Country and even his Blues couldn't be defined as Blues, Blues, but fast, folk music style blues.

The man can yoddle. I think I could learn to do that, if I would. What I like about the CD and its music is that it is simple. On a few songs you can hear a banjo, but basically, it is just Jack singing and playing.

The liner notes are excellent, but they are pretty much duplicated on the Internet if you search hard enough. The Animals standard, "House of the Rising Son," is nothing close to how Jack plays it. Jack uses one minor chord and actually creates a different tune to the song, with which the Animals sang. With real Blues made pop, you gotta' go with the Animals' version. But with simple folk music, you gotta hang on to Jack's interpretation.

His versatility on the guitar is evident. Jack plays in open chords only. That means that he seldom moves up the frets to pick out the lead. It is all picking from the open chords, which uses the fret bridge, extensively. His voice goes from loud to soft, and he doesn't mind getting up high and singing loud.

All the songs on the CD stand out. "Don't Think Twice; It's All Right," sounds like the commercial tune and approach. He adds many verses to "There's Too Many Girls Around," and this cut comes from a live performance. The only one, though.

There is a lot to be said about just one guy on the stage and his guitar, and that is Jack Elliott at his best.

I went to his homepage, and he's got a new album/CD coming out and gives us a chance to order it in advance. If you want to hear what a single singer and his guitar should sound like, Jack is the man. I like the CD. There is one song on there that could be called, "Folk Gospel," but other than that, we've got basic folk.

The fun thing to do would be, go to the list of songs on my last post, and run each one of them through a search engine, and see what you get.