Pop Music. - Review - movie review

ArtForum, Sept, 2000 by Howard Hampton

HOWARD HAMPTON ON THE BALLAD OF RAMBLIN' JACK

Aiyana Elliott's documentary about her demi-legend of a folksinger father, The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack (which opens nationally this month), is the kind of plainspoken memoir-cum-biography you might stumble across on PBS some uneventful night and gradually get caught up in, the rhythms of its unspooling anecdotes seducing you against your will. "I've never heard anybody that was so enchanting on subjects I didn't give a damn about," is Kris Kristofferson's affectionate characterization of the sixty-nine-year-old raconteur, rake, and self-made myth whose pale faux-Guthrie warble may be his least engaging quality. Ramblin' Jack Elliott's a terrific character all right--the son of a Jewish doctor, he ran away from Brooklyn at fourteen to join the rodeo and learn cowboy songs--but not the most convincing singer: Studying at Woody Guthrie's clay feet and later mentoring a young Bob Dylan, Elliott never quite found a way to make a song his own. In The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, music inevitably takes a backseat to cha rmingly ornery personality, to the lure of the open road and the idea that "out there" in the American cosmology, a nice Grand-Ole-Opry-loving Jewish kid could grow up to live out his boyhood dreams and transform himself into a roving emblem of hardscrabble, salt-of-the-earth authenticity.

Begun as a short piece for a film class at NYU and expanded to feature length when Aiyana Elliott saw that "many of [her] dad's contemporaries started dying," this melange of reminiscences, travelogue, home movies, old recordings, new performances, and found footage tells two parallel stories. On one hand we have Ramblin' Jack's determinedly colorful life and times; on the other Aiyana's quest to understand this absentee father, who seems to be elsewhere even when he's right in front of her. Being the daughter of a guy who calls himself Ramblin' Jack is bound to make for a bumpy ride, and the rueful acceptance she arrives at by movie s end is likely the best anyone in such longsuffering shoes can hope for--profound illumination isn't in these cards.

A gray-haired but still wide-eyed English folkie provides The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack's most telling moment, when he speaks of a night forty-odd years ago in London, the night he learned that his Stetson-hatted hero was in reality Elliott Charles Adnopoz. Instead of being disillusioned, he took it as a revelation of possibility: "You can completely turn your back on your roots." Which recasts the music as a way of escaping the burden of one's own existence into the fancies of self-reinvention, the romance of hard times and rough places--a surreptitious ballad of adventure, solace, and rebirth, sung at the crossroads where Franz K.'s Nature Theater of Oklahoma and Guthrie's Dust Bowl intersect: Only in Amerika.

Howard Hampton writes frequently on film for Artforum.