By Amanda Petrusich for Pitchfork
GENRE: Electronic / Folk/Country
LABEL: Anti-
REVIEWED: January 2, 2007

Veteran folkie and Woody Guthrie protégé enlists the help of Lucinda Williams, Corin Tucker, Nels Cline, and Flea on his new album and first since 1999's The Long Ride.Ramblin' Jack Elliott first met Woody Guthrie in Coney Island in Febuary 1951. Elliott was 20 years old then, the son of a prominent Brooklyn surgeon, and wholly preoccupied with his own overly romantic notions of the American west-- cowboys, shotguns, and pickup trucks. Elliott (born Elliott Charles Adnopoz) had ditched his family for the rodeo when he was 14, changed his name to Buck (and, eventually, Jack), and, by mid-1951, returned to New York and taken up partial residency in Guthrie's tiny apartment. Guthrie was 40 years old, at the end of a tumultuous second marriage, and beginning to show signs of Huntington's Disease, a neurodegenerative genetic condition that led to his psychosis and, eventually, death. Elliott, by his own admission, was a mimic, assimilating Guthrie's vocal tics, songbook, and style. According to Guthrie's biographer, Ed Cray, Guthrie was flattered, operating by an old Lead Belly dictum: "I ain't gonna show it to ya, but you're welcome to steal it if ya like."

After Guthrie's death in 1967, Elliott had considerable success touring Europe, and released at least a dozen records in America, including several collections of Woody Guthrie songs (Elliott was never much of a songwriter himself). I Stand Alone, his first since 1999's The Long Ride, sees a 75-year-old Elliott pair up with a bunch of contemporary musicians (including Corin Tucker, Lucinda Williams, Wilco's Nels Cline, and, weirdly, Flea), playing traditional folk songs and cuts by The Carter Family, Lead Belly, Ernest Tubb, and Butch Hawes. Elliott's 30-second take on Lead Belly's "Jean Harlow" is strangely thrilling, while the original "Woody's Last Ride" pits spare autoharp, windy atmospherics, and Elliott's own deliriously weathered speaking voice, as he talks through the last time he saw Guthrie, collecting change in a paper beer cup in Washington Square Park and using the cash to drive cross-country in a Buick. Traditional "Willy Moore" (famously recorded by Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, and Joan Baez) sounds like a Guthrie outtake, Elliott's voice grizzled and fragile, cracking over jumpy strums. I Stand Alone is fleeting and intimate, focused, for the most part, on Elliott's salty vocals: His straining, soulful growls on Hoagie Carmichael's famed "Hong Kong Blues", the strongest track here, are full of spit and swing.

Nearly a decade after Elliott and Guthrie first began playing together, a 19-year-old Bob Dylan, fresh from Minnesota, landed in New York, playing Guthrie songs and doing his best to sound more like a Dust Bowl survivor than a middle-class Jewish kid from Duluth. Dylan was derided for pinching Jack Elliott's appropriation of Guthrie (in Chronicles, Dylan talks about meeting folk purist Jon Pancake, who told him, "You better think of something else. You're doing it for nothing. Jack Elliott's already been where you are and gone.") By the time Dylan managed to weasel his way into Guthrie's sickbed, Guthrie was almost unintelligible; nearly everything Dylan learned about Guthrie's performance style he picked up from Ramblin' Jack Elliott. So in grand folk tradition, Elliott was an essential conduit, bringing Guthrie's spirit to the folk revivalists of the early 1960s. And while Elliott may be most famous for continuing to disseminate Guthrie's style (and songbook) long after his death, I Stand Alone is an achievement on its own merits, a charming collection of ancient folk songs perfectly, earnestly rendered.

Pitchfork: I Stand Alone Ramblin' Jack Elliott 2006