Brooklyn-born Elliott Charles Adnopoz had only just started calling himself “Ramblin’ Jack” in the early 1950s when he came upon a new hero in the wilds of San Francisco.
This was a couple years after Elliott had met in his first and most influential mentor — the legendary singer/songwriter/poet Woody Guthrie — whose work and philosophy would shape the 20-something Jack’s long life as an itinerant folksinger.
Enter Lone Cat
A few years after Woody, Elliott rambled all the way across the country and met an extraordinary 60-year-old one-man band by the name of Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller who was playing on the streets and in the coffeehouses of California’s Bay Area.
Jesse, taking a liking to the eager young wanderer, personally taught Jack his best composition — “San Francisco Bay Blues” — just a few years after he had written and recorded it himself.
To this day, Jack Elliott — who just last month turned 94 and is still traveling and performing — makes Fuller’s tune a centerpiece in his set list, often introducing it with stories about the song's creator.
As the first performer to cover the tune after Fuller’s original recording, Elliott included the song on his 1958 album, Jack Takes the Floor. That track played a crucial role in popularizing “San Francisco Bay Blues” during the burgeoning folk revival of the 1960s. After Jack’s take, the tune entered the canon of many an up-and-coming trouper, from Tom Rush to Richie Havens to Peter, Paul and Mary.
Since then, the song has had an extraordinarily diverse number of covers, by Bob Dylan and Jim Kweskin, by Jim Croce and The Weavers, by Hot Tuna and Janis Joplin.
Even The Beatles faked a version of it during the Get Back/Let it Be sessions on Jan. 14, 1969. Later John Lennon recorded an unreleased version during his Imagine sessions in May 1971, while McCartney performed it often during his solo concerts in San Francisco. It is still played frequently at Paul’s soundchecks around the world.
Eric Clapton performed the song on MTV Unplugged in 1992 during the taping in England. The live album earned six Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.
How Jack Began to Ramble
Back to Jack, Elliott's life took many turns before he embraced music. Born in New York in 1931, Jack grew up in a family that hoped he would follow his father’s example and go into medicine.
But young Elliott was captivated by rodeos and the cowboy life, attending events at Madison Square Garden. At just 15, he rebelled. Running away from home, he joined Colonel Jim Eskew's Rodeo, a journey that took him across the Mid-Atlantic states.
Though his rodeo stint lasted only three months, the experience was formative. After he learned guitar and some banjo from a singing cowboy rodeo clown named Brahmer Rogers, Jack was on the path to a music career.
Back in Brooklyn, he polished his guitar playing and then started busking for a living. It was just a little later that Jack became a devoted student and admirer of famed folkie Woody Guthrie. Elliott even lived in the Guthrie home for two years.
Jack absorbed Guthrie's style of playing and singing so well that Woody himself once remarked, "He sounds more like me than I do."
About That Name
One story about Jack is that his iconic nickname didn’t relate so much to his wanderlust as to his storytelling acumen.
The late folk singer Odetta always contended that it was her mother who coined the name. "Oh, Jack Elliott,” she was said to have remarked, “yeah, he can sure ramble on!"
Jack’s Musical Offspring
In the early 1960s, Elliott toured Britain and Europe with banjo-picking buddy Derroll Adams, recording several albums for Topic Records. In London, the two played small clubs and West End cabarets.
Upon returning to the States a couple years later, Elliott found that his albums had preceded him. Suddenly, he had become something of an underground star in the nascent folk music scene around Greenwich Village. Now he was the mentor to newcomers, most notably to a 19-year-old Bob Dylan, who had just hit town. Bob came such a “Ramblin’ Jack” fixture that some started calling him “son of Jack.”
Over the years, Jack influenced a generation of musicians, from Phil Ochs and Tom Rush to the Grateful Dead. In the UK, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Rod Stewart all have paid tribute to his style.
But it took a few more decades for Elliott to finally get widespread recognition. His 1995 album, South Coast, earned him his first Grammy. In 1998, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton.
His long life and career were chronicled in the 2000 documentary, The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, directed and produced by his daughter, Aiyana Elliott.
Back to the Song
Honestly, we don’t remember when we first started doing Jesse Fuller’s “San Francisco Bay Blues.” It was back when we were youngsters at those good old folk music parties in the ‘60s.
A decade later, the tune was firmly entrenched when The Flood came together. And we were still playing it in 2001 when we recorded our first album, on which it’s the closing track.
That was a good call, because we often use this song to close out a show, since it gives everybody in the band one more solo before we call it a night, as you can hear in this take from last week’s rehearsal.
