Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
Beginning with his superb 1995 album South Coast, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s latter-latter-day career has been served well by a steady stream of recording sessions that emphasize his epic personality, his ragged-but-right guitar playing, and his voice a prickly, irrepressible instrument that can tell a story in a single consonant or vowel. Now, at 77, paired with producer Joe Henry and an all-star band, he’s made the most musically satisfying and cohesive record anyone might hope for.
Like a hybrid of the classic early ’50s recordings of piano pounder Memphis Slim and Swordfishtrombones Unplugged, A Stranger Here sounds like nothing else in Elliott’s catalogue. Henry surrounds Jack’s zig-zagging, barfly delivery with an improvising barrelhouse band, defined by Jay Bellerose’s drums and percussion, Keith Ciancia’s hard striding piano, David Hildago’s accordion and guitar, Greg Leisz’s slide and mandolin, and some eerie vibraphone and piano work from Van Dyke Parks.
Within these blues, the players go where they want, but always together, always forward and brightly strutting with life, while Henry laces the background with faint rumbles and buzzes that sound like the rustling of violent spirits. But as ornate and rich as the sound can be, the record never feels like a stage production. It sounds like what it is: a band of veterans tinkering, toying and communicating with the risks and rhythms of the capital-B Blues.
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The sound of musicians and a singer having a ferociously great time with harrowing material lends the record an uncanny, compelling spirit. The songs come from the hardest heart of American folk music: Depression-era country blues. Beginning with a stormy version of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Rising High Water Blues” and ending with a chilling take of Reverend Gary Davis’ “Please Remember Me”, the ten songs sound as prophetic as any that Elliott has recorded, though the old cuss’s legendary humor is far from dried up by the relentless intentions of the blues. On Furry Lewis’ “Falling Down Blues”, Elliott rolls every phrase around his maw, savoring the free associations, and on Mississippi John Hurt’s “Richland Women Blues”, he sounds like an impish dandy.
The core of the album, though, is a dynamic, mode-shifting “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” (another Davis tune) and Blind Willie Johnson’s immortal “Soul Of A Man”. The latter track opens with Greg Leisz’s spectral Weissenborn slide and shakes and shivers of percussion, building with what sounds like backward-looped strings and David Piltch’s window-rattling bass. Elliott just pronounces, dryly and mightily, the repeated question, “What is the soul of a man?” with no hope of an answer beyond the one resonating in the music all around him.