Ramblin' Jack Elliott, American folk troubadour, is 92 years old today
Ramblin' Jack Elliott, American folk troubadour, is 92 years old today
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott performs with Al Kooper in New York City, 2006
Photo by Frank Beacham
Ramblin' Jack Elliott is 92 years old today.
Born as Elliot Charles Adnopoz in Brooklyn to Jewish parents, Elliott is a folk singer. He grew up inspired by the rodeos at Madison Square Garden, and wanted to be a cowboy.
Though encouraged to follow his father's example and become a surgeon, Elliott rebelled, running away from home at the age of 15 to join Col. Jim Eskew's Rodeo, the only rodeo east of the Mississippi. They traveled throughout the Mid-Atlantic states and New England. He was only with them for three months before his parents tracked him down and had him sent home
But Elliott was exposed to his first singing cowboy, Brahmer Rogers, a rodeo clown who played guitar and five-string banjo, sang songs and recited poetry. Back home, Elliott taught himself guitar and started busking for a living. Eventually, he got together with Woody Guthrie and stayed with him as an admirer and student.
With banjo player, Derroll Adams, he toured the United Kingdom and Europe. By 1960, he had recorded three folk albums for the UK record label, Topic Records.
In London, Elliott played small clubs and pubs by day and West End cabaret nightclubs at night. When he returned to the States, he found he had become renowned in American folk music circles.
Woody Guthrie had the greatest influence on Elliott. Woody's son, Arlo, said that because of Woody's illness and early death, Arlo never really got to know him, but learned his father's songs and performing style from Elliott.
Elliott's guitar and his mastery of Guthrie's material had a big impact on Bob Dylan when he lived in Minneapolis. When he reached New York, Dylan was sometimes referred to as the “son” of Jack Elliott, because Elliott had a way of introducing Dylan's songs with the words: "Here's a song from my son, Bob Dylan."
Dylan rose to prominence as a songwriter. Elliott continued as an interpretative troubadour, bringing old songs to new audiences in his idiosyncratic manner.
Elliott also influenced Phil Ochs, and played guitar and sang harmony on Ochs' song "Joe Hill" his album, Tape from California. Elliott also discovered singer-songwriter, Guthrie Thomas, in a bar in Northern California in 1974. He brought Thomas to Hollywood, where Thomas' music career began.
Elliott plays guitar in a traditional fingerpicking style, which he matches with his laconic, humorous storytelling — often accompanying himself on harmonica. His singing has a strained, nasal quality which the young Bob Dylan emulated. His repertoire includes American traditional music from various genres, including country, blues, bluegrass and folk.
Elliott's nickname comes not from his traveling habits, but rather the countless stories he relates before answering the simplest of questions. Folk singer Odetta claimed that it was her mother who gave him the name, remarking, "Oh, Jack Elliott, yeah, he can sure ramble on!"
His authenticity as a folksy, down-to-earth country boy, despite being a doctor's son from Brooklyn, and his disdain for other folk singers, were parodied by the Folksmen (Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer) in the satirical documentary, A Mighty Wind, in the name of their "hit" album, Ramblin'.
A Mighty Wind also referred to a former member of the New Main Street Singers, Ramblin' Sandy Pitnick, a somewhat geeky-looking white man in a cowboy hat, apparently in parody of Elliott.
Elliott was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1998. His long career and strained relationship with his daughter, Aiyana, were chronicled in her 2000 film documentary, The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack.
At the age of 75, he changed labels and released I Stand Alone on the ANTI- label, with an assortment of guest backup players including members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, another curious collection of little-known music delivered with humor and intensity.
He said his intention was to title the album “Not for the Tourists,” because it was recorded in response to his daughter's request for songs he loved but never played in concert. When asked why he did not, he told her, "These songs are not for the tourists."
Here, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot perform Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright.”
Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Woody Guthrie
Sam and Ann Charters
Samuel Charters was born 94 years ago today.
Born in Pittsburgh, Charters was a music historian, writer, record producer, musician and poet. He was a noted and widely published author on the subjects of blues and jazz music, as well as a writer of fiction.
Charters was born into an upper-middle-class family that was interested in listening to and playing music of all sorts. "I grew up in a world of band rehearsals, blues records and a whole consciousness of jazz . . . The family also played ragtime, also played Debussy, also was involved in hearing Bartok's new music. It was a general musical cultural interest in which jazz was central."
Charters first became enamored of blues music in 1937, after hearing Bessie Smith's version of Jimmy Cox's song, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out." He moved with his family to Sacramento at the age of 15. Charters said that he was "playing clarinet, playing jazz steadily all this time; I had my first orchestra when I was thirteen . . . I had no natural abilities, but I soldiered on, and it was this that directly lead [sic] me to the beginning of the research."
Charters attended high schools in Pittsburgh and California and attended Sacramento City College, graduating in 1949. After completing military service during the Korean War, he received a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956.
In the 1940s and 1950s, though he was mostly immersed in studying and playing jazz, Charters also purchased numerous old recordings of American blues musicians, eventually amassing a huge and valuable collection and beginning to understand that blues and jazz were connected in the history of black music.
In 1951, at the age of 21, he moved to New Orleans, where he absorbed the history and culture he had previously only read about. He lived there for most of the 1950s, moving back and forth between Berkeley and New Orleans. He served for two years in the United States Army (1951–53) and began to study jazz clarinet with George Lewis.
Charters was always interested in politics and had wished to play a role in public life, but because he had run afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee while in the Army in 1952, he decided that he would have to engage in politics without holding any sort of office.
"For me, the writing about black music was my way of fighting racism. That's why my work is not academic, that is why it is absolutely nothing but popularization: I wanted people to hear black music, as I said in The Poetry of the Blues . . . It's where I say, you know, if by introducing music I can have somebody look across the racial divide and see a black face and see this person as a human being — and that's why my work is unashamedly romantic."
Charters always thought of blues as containing within it a small and pure strain of folk poetry, something that ran through the lyrics of early artists such as Charley Patton or Blind Willie McTell, but which was lost in the later, more commercialized, blues. "I really got bored with all those damn guitar solos. To me, they all sounded like B.B. King, and what I really wanted to hear was great text . . ."
The poetry of the blues, then, Charters thought of as profound human cultural expression that could connect all people who love poetry. For years he had been doing research into the history of jazz, but in the 1950s he also began to study the blues.
Noticing that his copy of the bluesman Robert Johnson's recordings were recorded in San Antonio, Charters set out for Texas in 1953 to discover what he could about Robert Johnson, but also about another favorite musician, Blind Willie Johnson.
For Charters and his wife, Ann Charters, the search for Robert Johnson began his years of doing field recordings (initially for Folkways Records throughout the United States, and then in the Bahamas in 1958 where he made the first recordings of Joseph Spence). Their 1959 recordings of the Texas bluesman, Lightnin' Hopkins, proved instrumental to Hopkins' rediscovery.
Also in 1959, Charters published his very influential book, The Country Blues, the first history of blues and an absorbing account of his search for the bluesmen themselves, as well as issuing the companion album to accompany it.
During the years of field work in the 1950s that lead to the publication of The Country Blues, Charters always felt overwhelmed with the amount of work required to properly document the music of black Americans and hoped that his writing would encourage others to join him.
"I always had the feeling that there were so few of us, and the work so vast. That's why I wrote the books as I did — to romanticize the glamor of looking for old blues singers. I was saying, 'Help! This job is really big, and I really need lots of help!' I really exaggerated this, but it worked! My God, I came back from that year in Europe and I found kids doing research in the South . . . They almost all came to me at some point, they wrote me a letter saying this is what I'm doing."
Charters' writings have been influential, bringing to light aspects of African American music and culture that had previously been largely unknown to the general public, as well as publishing poetry and novels. His writings include numerous books on the subjects of blues, jazz, African music, and Bahamian music, as well as liner notes for numerous sound recordings.
From 1966 to 1970, he worked as a producer for the psychedelic, anti-war band, Country Joe and the Fish (all albums except CJ Fish in 1970). He became thoroughly disenchanted with American politics during the Vietnam War and moved with his family to Sweden, establishing a new life there despite not being able to speak the language at first.
He divided his time between Sweden (where he had Swedish citizenship, though maintaining his U.S. citizenship) and Connecticut. He translated into English the works of the Swedish writer, Tomas Tranströmer, and helped produce the music of various Swedish musical groups.
Charters' first marriage, at the age of 20, ended in divorce. In 1959, Charters married the writer, editor, Beat generation scholar, photographer and pianist Ann Charters (b. 1936), whom he met at the University of California, Berkeley during the 1954-55 academic year in a music class. She is a retired professor of English and American literature at the University of Connecticut.
Charters’ book, The Country Blues, was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1991 as one of the "Classics of Blues Literature."
In 2000, Charters and his wife donated the “Samuel & Ann Charters Archive of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture” to the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. The archive contains materials collected during the couple's decades of work documenting and preserving African American music throughout the United States, the Caribbean and Africa.
The archive's materials include more than 2,500 sound recordings, as well as video recordings, photographs, monographs, sheet music, field notes, correspondence, musicians' contracts and correspondence.
Charters' book, A Trumpet Around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz, was released in April, 2008.
Charters died at his home in Arsta, Sweden on March 18, 2015 of myelodysplastic syndrome, a type of bone marrow cancer.
His is a video on Sam Charters collection at the University of Connecticut.
Jerry Garcia was born 81 years ago today.
Garcia was best known for his lead guitar work, singing and songwriting with the Grateful Dead. Though he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader or "spokesman" of the group.
One of its founders, Garcia performed with the Grateful Dead for their entire 30 years of musical performances from 1965 to 1995. He also founded and participated in a variety of side projects, including the Saunders-Garcia Band (with longtime friend, Merl Saunders), Jerry Garcia Band, Old and in the Way, the Garcia/Grisman acoustic duo, Legion of Mary and the New Riders of the Purple Sage (which Garcia co-founded with John Dawson and David Nelson).
Garcia released several solo albums, and contributed to a number of albums by other artists over the years as a session musician. He was well known by many for his distinctive guitar playing.
Later in life, Garcia was sometimes ill because of his unstable weight, and in 1986 went into a diabetic coma that nearly cost him his life. Although his overall health improved somewhat after that, he also struggled with heroin and cocaine addictions, and was staying in a California drug rehabilitation facility when he died of a heart attack in August, 1995.
In 1987, ice cream manufacturer Ben & Jerry's came out with Cherry Garcia, which is named after the guitarist and consists of "cherry ice cream with cherries and fudge flakes.”
Guitarist Warren Haynes wrote the song "Patchwork Quilt" in memory of Garcia. Reggae artist Burning Spear paid homage by releasing the song, "Play Jerry," in 1997.
According to fellow Bay Area guitar player Henry Kaiser, Garcia is "the most recorded guitarist in history.” With more than 2,200 Grateful Dead concerts, and 1,000 Jerry Garcia Band concerts captured on tape – as well as numerous studio sessions – there are about 15,000 hours of his guitar work preserved for the ages.
On July 30, 2004, Melvin Seals was the first Jerry Garcia Band member to headline an outdoor music and camping festival called the Grateful Garcia Gathering.
On July 21, 2005, the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission passed a resolution to name the amphitheater in McLaren Park, "The Jerry Garcia Amphitheater." The amphitheater is located in the Excelsior District, where Garcia grew up.
Here, Garcia performs Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.”
George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Leon Russell perform during 1971's Concert for Bangladesh
The Concert for Bangladesh was held 52 years ago today.
The concert was the name for two benefit concerts organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, held at noon and at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 1 1971. It played to a total of 40,000 people at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
The shows were to raise international awareness and fund relief efforts for refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), following the 1970 Bhola cyclone and the civil war-related Bangladesh atrocities.
The Concert for Bangladesh was also the title of the accompanying live album, a boxed three-record set, released in December, 1971, and Apple Films' concert documentary, which opened in cinemas in the spring of 1972.
The event was the first-ever benefit concert of such a magnitude and featured a supergroup of performers that included Harrison, fellow ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell and the band, Badfinger. In addition, Shankar and another legend of Indian music, Ali Akbar Khan, performed a separate set.
Decades later, Shankar would say of the overwhelming success of the event: "In one day, the whole world knew the name of Bangladesh. It was a fantastic occasion ..." The concert raised close to $250,000 for Bangladesh relief, which was administered by UNICEF.
Although the project was subsequently marred by financial problems — a result of the pioneering nature of the venture — the Concert for Bangladesh is recognized as a highly successful and influential humanitarian aid project. It generated both awareness and considerable funds as well as providing valuable lessons and inspiration for aid projects that followed, notably Live Aid.
As with the live album, sales of the 2005 DVD release of the film continue to benefit the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF.
Here is a trailer for the concert film.
The harmonica was developed in Europe in the early part of the 19th century. Free-reed instruments like the sheng were fairly common throughout East Asia for centuries and were relatively well known in Europe for some time.
While Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann is often cited as the inventor of the harmonica in 1821, other inventors developed similar instruments at the same time. Mouth-blown free reed instruments appeared in the United States, South America and in Europe at roughly the same time. The reason it was made was so it could be used for classical music.
However, in 1964 — 59 years ago today — Billboard Magazine reported that the harmonica was making a comeback in a big way. The article credited Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Steve Wonder for the renaissance.
Today, the harmonica is known for its use in the blues, American folk music, jazz, country and rock and roll.
Illustration of Melville by Patrick Arrasmith
Herman Melville was born 204 years ago today.
Melville was novelist, writer of short stories and poet from the American Renaissance period. Most of his writings were published between 1846 and 1857. Best known for his sea adventure, Typee (1846), and his whaling novel, Moby-Dick (1851), he was almost forgotten during the last thirty years of his life.
Melville's writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy, and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. The main characteristic of his style is probably its heavy allusiveness — a reflection of his use of written sources.
Melville's way of adapting what he read for his own new purposes, scholar Stanley T. Williams wrote, "was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare's.”
Born in New York City as the third child of a merchant in French dry-goods, Melville's formal education stopped abruptly after the death of his father in 1832. Shortly after bankruptcy left the family in financial straits. Melville briefly became a schoolteacher before he took to sea in 1839.
His voyage to Liverpool as a common sailor on a merchant ship became the basis for his fourth book, Redburn (1849). In late December, 1840, he signed up aboard the Acushnet for his first whaling voyage, but jumped ship eighteen months later in the Marquesas Islands.
His first book, Typee (1846), a fictionalized account of his life among the natives there, became such a success that he worked up a sequel, Omoo (1847). The same year Melville married Elizabeth Knapp Shaw. Their four children were born between 1849 and 1855.
In August, 1850, Melville moved his family to a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he established a profound but short-lived friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Moby-Dick was published in 1851 to mixed reviews, but proved a commercial failure. Less than a year later, Melville's career as a popular author effectively ended. The next years he turned to writing short fiction for magazines, such as "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno." After the serialized novel, Israel Potter, was published as a book in 1855, the short stories were collected in 1856 as, The Piazza Tales.
Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891 at age 72. The 1919 centennial of his birth became the starting point of the "Melville Revival." Critics discovered his work, scholars explored his life, his major novels and stories became world classics. His poetry gradually attracted new respect.
Compartment C, Car 293, 1938
Painting by Edward Hopper