Rambling Jack Elliott could not have earned himself a more fitting nickname. Lord, he was born a rambling man, but a man who rambles too much is a man that you can't pin down. He was a folk singer, a man whose soul could whip up the most heartfelt music you ever heard, yet he never seems to have had a commitment to anything.The documentary "The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack" is very much about what kept his career from taking off. Directed and narrated by his daughter Aiyana – from his fourth marriage – the film is a personal essay mostly from her point of view about what it was like growing up the child of a man who never seemed to have an organized thought in mind. In his music, as in life he rambled and rambled and rambled.In the 50s and early 60s he came up alongside Woody Guthrie and a budding young singer named Robert Allen Zimmerman (who you know as Bob Dylan). He knew them both well, but somehow those two had a better plan in life and in their music. During a tribute concert for Guthrie following his death in 1967, Dylan was a headliner but Elliott was left off the program. As time went on, he would watch both men become legends, while he became a footnote, seen only as a meager thread between the end of Guthrie and the beginning of Dylan. Reading a review of his own career, Elliott – still alive at 82 - blows the paper a satisfied raspberry.He was born in Brooklyn in 1931 as Elliott Charles Adnopoz, a doctor's son who ran away from home at an early age to join up with the rodeo. He had a deep passion for the cowboy life and, despite his origins made his own image as the kind of folk singer whose music was the cry of the wounded. He rambled from one thing to the next and just kept right on rambling. That was the problem, the rambles kept him from finding a foothold in the industry. Late in the film, one of his managers laments that "I respected his talent, but he was too disorganized." We can see that early on in a clip from his appearance on The Johnny Cash Show as Elliott befuddles his fellow players – and even Cash himself – as he can't quite decide on which key to begin.It's hard to know where to stand with this documentary because you become so fixated on the fact that it was Elliott that killed his own career. He rambled on and rambled on, never finding a place for himself. By the end, you wonder if he liked frustrating those around him, or if his mind blew from one thing to the next just like his music.

"Ballad Of Ramblin' Jack Elliott" (2000) documentary: Wonderful portrait of a '60's era rebel and artist of high gifts who never quit the 60's...and he's 81 years old in 2012.The cult movie titled "My Dinner With Andre" (1981) poses the question "What if the 1960's were the high point of civilization, and it's all downhill after that, from now on?" Well, maybe it is.People who want to see a portrait of a true 1960's person with the wonderful mentality of those long departed times should see this documentary movie.Ramblin Jack Elliott was (and is...still living at age 81 in 2012 as this is written) a true 1960's person, and was before the 1960's even started. He started his 1960's life in the 1940's when he ran away from home to become a cowboy, and later became the protégé and house mate of Woody Guthrie in Queens (NYC), New York before Woody lost his health.See the Wikipedia biog article about Ramblin Jack Elliott to learn about what is shown in this wonderful documentary, made by his daughter, Aiyanna Elliott.She's a predictably bitchy radical feminist, and so was her mother....no wonder Ramblin Jack spent little time with either of them over the years, and no wonder he apologizes very little for his avoidance, non-presence in their lives. Dreadful women, and the documentary shows that, though that is not supposed to be the point of what is revealed.Jack Elliott is a wonderful person and a gifted artist. This movie shows that.He was part of the 1960's and never left it, never gave up.....is still out there "doin" it.I've never seen such a terrific portrait of a 1960's person as in this documentary. Another worth seeing, which shows the same thing (a 60's guy who never left the 1960's, even in his old age) is the documentary titled "George Harrison: Living In The Material World" (2011).Neither Elliott nor Harrison were political....both were musicians, primarily, and the music in both docs is wonderful to hear and remember, especially for those who were there for the 1960's and remember it well, and miss it.--------------- Written by Tex Allen, SAG actor. Email Tex at [email protected]. Information about Tex Allen movie credits, biog facts, and interests at WWW.IMDb.Me/TexAllen.

I eagerly started to read the review of Sumland from San Francisco regarding this film and was was turned off two thirds of the way by his biased rambling and criticisms of Elliot's daughter Aiyana...Sumland seems to think women should just "put up and shut up" regarding the actions of emotionally immature fathers and husbands who may be charming performer and musicans but lousy family members...Women don't have enough assertiveness , ego, and self esteem to begin with regarding relationships, they are expected to carry all the responsibility for relationships and then are blamed when they fail...Hooray for Aiyana for her candor , honesty, maturity and sensitivity regarding her father...Too bad people like Sumland cant handle the truth and would rather have women sugarcoat the reality of their experiences that excuses poor parenting and spousal behavior...."If women all told the truth of their experiences, the world would split open"...Audra Lourde

Of general interest due to Ramblin' Jack Elliott's role in creating the archetype of the American folk music hero, given tangible historic expression in his serving as the link between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, specifically, as the model for the latter's original stage persona. Elliott, fashioning himself after, as protégé of, Guthrie, was one of the first to imagine and create the role of the American minstrel from which innumerable others have borrowed and to this day continue to borrow.This film would have been infinitely more interesting without the first-person intrusion of the film maker, Elliott's daughter, who from the start sets out to have that one heart-to-heart with her daddy she never had; she almost makes herself the subject of this film, but who would see it if she were? The daughter-in-search-of-father theme interferes not only with the objectivity of this biography of folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott (1931-present), but it disrupts the chronological depiction of events: the film jumps confusingly between recent and distant past to accommodate the daughter's story, which includes redundant home-movie footage of her as a child. Does the world really need one more egocentric female narrative of the parent-that-never-was, of familial "dysfunction"? Bookstore shelves and the rolls of indie films are already overfilled with every conceivable variant of this bourgeois American-woman self-preoccupation. This domestic mindset is so pervasive that I suspect its root cause is the feminist parochialism of university writing and film departments in which these women were initially "empowered." And/or is this the self-pitying cultural legacy of psychoanalysis? (Faulkner: "motherblood with hate loves and cohabits.")Yes, Ramblin' Jack was a lousy parent, always absent, on the road. Anyone who expected otherwise had to have been totally impervious to who and what he was. The very qualities that make him special, for which he is prized and loved, namely, his unspoiled childlike sense of wonder, the freshness and simplicity of his vision, his offbeat folky genuineness, all arise from the fact that Elliott from the first refused to grow up, that he willfully turned his back on the world of adult responsibility and conventional adult social identities, choosing, instead, to live out the fantasy of the cowboy troubadour, literally running away from his Brooklyn home to join the rodeo at the age of 16. Was this in reaction to the anhedonia of his Jewish parents, the echo of the holocaust in modern America? His mother (we are told) was a driven, unpleasant woman who wanted Jack to be a doctor just like his father, who (we are told) was an aloof workaholic. Elliott Adnopoz--Jack's real name--obviously rebelled against being force fed the conventional American dream, sought instead bohemian outlet in the romanticism of the American frontier, the American West.Unlike Louis Prima: The Wildest, which was redeemed from its adulatory distortions by ample actual footage of its subject performing, this film mercilessly cuts into Ramblin' Jack's performances to editorialize on his failings and vent his daughter's frustrations. Still, because Elliott's life intersected so deeply and so often the currents of American folk and pop music, we are inevitably given a backstage glimpse of that larger, more important drama. His journeys encompassed the cultural suffocation of the Eisenhower years, the skiffle movement and origins of rock music in England, the American folk renaissance of the 60's, and the hippie culture of the West Coast. Alan Lomax, Dave van Ronk, Arlo and sister Nora Guthrie, Odetta, Kris Kristofferson, and Pete Seeger all check in with impressions and recollections of Jack. One could only wish that Aiyana Elliott could have imbued her film with more of her father's casual charm, his gentle whimsiness. The heavy hand of this author makes one appreciate all the more Errol Morris, whose documentaries tell themselves without even the voice of a narrator.