Ramblin' Jack Elliott enters studio

Together, musician and producer examine a carefully selected number of pre-WWII blues songs. "Jack Elliot had never approached this music before," said Henry, "but it's important to understand that many of the country blues masters represented here were friends of Jack's. These blues share a tremendous amount - in both form and substance - with the folk music of the same era, the 1930s; and few people made any such distinctions during that day. Everybody was dipping from the same stream, be it Woody Guthrie or Tampa Red, Jimmie Rodgers or Furry Lewis; and Jack drank it all in. His approach is fresh, but authentic. He's using an old language, but he's speaking in the present tense."

The CD will be out next year.

As a budding musician, Jack developed his voice under the tutelage of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, truck hitching across the country off and on for a couple of years with Guthrie, carrying "only razors and guitars." The pair eventually landed in Topanga Canyon Cal. in the 1950s, where Elliott played for James Dean and stole his girl (who later became Elliott's first wife). On the other coast, Elliott was also a fixture of the Greenwich Village scene, and once spent "three days and a lot of wine" listening to Jack Kerouac read "On the Road." But it is his relationship with a young Bob Dylan that Elliott is perhaps most famous for. Though back in the 1960s the up-and-coming Dylan was often mistakenly dubbed the "son of Jack Elliott," today Elliott simply states "Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody."