Ramblin' Jack Elliott - A Stranger Here reviews
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| Guardian |
 Born two years into the last big depression, Ramblin' Jack Elliott must have assumed he'd never see another. But here the folk legend rings in the new with songs from the old, sensitively produced by Joe Henry. Underlining the contemporary resonance, he begins with Blind Lemon Jefferson's Rising High Water Blues, reworked as a New Orleans dirge. The cracks in the 77-year-old voice only make songs like Death Don't Have No Mercy even more intimate....full text |
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| Boston |
The country-blues songbook as written by Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, and Charley Patton seems like natural, if previously unexplored, territory for this folk legend. Add producer Joe Henry and a crack band including pianist Van Dyke Parks, Los Lobos' David Hidalgo, and Boston drummer Jay Bellerose and the results are soulful, moody, and entrancing.
Little details like Hidalgo's acoustic slide guitar on "How Long Blues" and the electric rumble he tags on "Falling Down Blues" underline the humanity etched into Elliott's well-traveled, tattered, 77-year-old voice. But Henry's too smart to be predictable, so it's piano — not the genre's emblematic six-strings — that shares the most space with Elliott's dusty-road emoting. And there's even a little vibraphone to help recast Elliott's own "Please Remember Me" as lounge fare. T...full text |
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| Popmaters |
It’s unclear how much Ramblin’ Jack Elliott really remembers about the Great Depression. After all, the 77-year-old folk singer was just a child when the Depression ended. Whether he directly absorbed what was happening remains questionable, but he certainly soaked up the songs and culture on a deeper, more primal level. He must have sucked them up with his mother’s milk or on some other elemental level. The proof is evident on his latest Anti- release, a ten-song collection of Depression-era acoustic-blues classics that intimately conveys the heart of hard times in the country.
Elliott’s scratchy vocals and vibrato-guitar strumming keeps things as simple and honest as the dust on the road and a long, tall glass of water to a thirsty man. He brings forth a time when a man’s voice was the measure of his soul, and when no one could afford material possessions, a soul was all one had. Therefore, it makes sense Elliott offers a stripped-down version of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Soul of a Man”, asking the eternal question about how to measure the worth of a human being. In Elliott’s rendition, the answer becomes clear: Each person matters to God, and worldly possessions and accomplishments do not figure in the equation. He says this without saying it, just by raising the question in a voice that yearns for redemption....full text |
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