“His girlfriend was Tiny Ledbetter, Lead Belly’s niece.”Ī turning point came in 1951 when Elliott met his kindred spirit, Woody Guthrie. “Fred played Lead Belly songs on a 12-string guitar,” he recalls.

“Some kids even clapped.” Roy Acuff was his first singing influence, followed by Gene Autry, the Louvin Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, and Lonnie Johnson, whom Elliott would eventually meet at Gerde’s Folk City in the Village in 1961.ĭuring the summers of 19, Elliott played in Washington Square Park with budding folk artists Tom Paley, Erik Darling, Harry Smith, Roger Sprung, and Fred Gerlach. “I’d bring it to school and played for my fellow students on the front stoop, singing cowboy songs,” he recalls. His old Collegiate emerged from the closet. Three months later he was back home, but, perhaps stirred by his time on the road, Elliott’s passion for the guitar began to flourish. I played some banjo but never got good at it.” We had a rodeo clown, Brahmer Rogers, who played hillbilly songs on guitar and banjo. “I’d sleep in a tent with 60 horses three feet from their hind feet,” he says. “I suggested we hitchhike to Chicago to hear Bunk Johnson’s jazz band.”Īlong the way Elliott made a detour and, while passing through Washington, D.C., took a job grooming saddle horses with Jim Eskew’s Ranch Rodeo and Wild West Show. “We’d drink beer in a subterranean bar, near what became the Gaslight on MacDougal Street,” he says. His wanderlust inspired by a friendship with a local Danish sailmaker, Elliott ran away from home with his friends, “future beatnik poets” Don Finkel and Carl Margolies, in April 1947, when he was 15.

Ramblin' Jack Elliott, with his wife June (left), playing the guitar at an event in Stratford, London, circa 1960 (Image credit: John Pratt/Keystone Features/Getty Images)

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