Born in Brooklyn in 1931 under another name, Jack Elliott attended a rodeo in Madison Square Garden where his parents took him as a small child. There he managed to encounter a clown who played guitar and banjo with a repertoire of hillbilly songs. The boy was enthralled, and a life not quite like any other would soon be on its way.

When he got a little older, he looked up another New Yorker, Woody Guthrie, and traveled with him for a time, acquiring stories he would relate the rest of his days. By the early 1950s Elliott had become a budding figure on the New York City folk scene. He has lived in California for a long time. He seems to know just about everyone, from musicians to cultural figures to presidents. Kris Kristofferson, Guy Clark and others have written songs about him. He's famous, even if you haven't personally heard of him.

This is not the place for more than a few sentences' worth of biography. A full one, remarkably, has never been written, though inevitably that will happen one day. It bears mentioning that "Ramblin'" got attached to his name by Odetta's mother not for his incessant traveling but for his slow, wandering way of speech, which apparently drove her to distraction. Along with the late Dave Van Ronk, he was a huge influence on the fresh-from-Minnesota Bob Dylan, in particular on his vocals. He also became one of the revival's most accomplished guitar pickers.

Elliott lived in England between 1956 and 1961. While so situated, he teamed up with a gravel-voiced banjo player from Portland, Oregon, named Derroll Adams (who married into Belgium but remained an expatriate American folk singer till his death in 2000) to create this album. It has been known under various titles as it's been reissued over the decades. I encountered a version, with the misspelled name Jack Eliot (and with Adams uncredited) on the cover, while I was in college in the latter 1960s. It was my introduction to some enduring folk and country songs, which in a range of interpretations have followed me through life, always welcome, ever since.

The LP disappeared in a mass sale of vinyl decades ago. The song I remembered most vividly was the one Elliott & Adams called "Roll On Buddy" but is usually associated with the strange and memorable "I Was I Was a Mole in the Ground." In its most celebrated interpretation, it appears on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), cut by North Carolina musician and collector Bascom Lamar Lunsford in a 1928 session. While I love that version, Elliott & Adams perform a reading that touches my heart (not to mention my sense of the world's weirdness) just about as powerfully. Curiously, however, no mole in the ground is mentioned, nor for that matter is a lizard in the spring cited. Still, it is undeniably the same song. Dylan quotes it, by the way, in Blonde on Blonde's "Memphis Blues Again."

Even if I already knew this, still I was gratified that my memory hadn't failed me: this 1957 album -- which in this 2025 edition has been cleaned up and its sound sharpened, of course -- is a monumental improvement over other revival albums of the period. Most numbers on those were arranged as pop songs in all but name. This one has the feeling of a field recording: tough, raw and fearless. By now we're far more used to that sort of thing, but in its time it was aimed at a truly committed audience.

The songs, too, are different. Elliott had a taste for old hillbilly, so we get the likes of Grady & Hazel Cole's magnificent "The Tramp on the Street" (which if you're not listening closely could be a protest song) and Dorsey Dixon's "Wreck on the Highway," better known when by Roy Acuff. Few other city folk singers were paying attention to that kind of material in those days, not even to the bluegrass that had already turned traditionals such as "Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms" and "900 Miles" into genre standards.

Well before 2025, nearly all of Folkland's 14 numbers would have been familiar to those who know their roots music. Even so, even without the thrill of discovery, the album has lost none of its power. I was downright rattled to find how good it was and is, actually better than a whole lot of decent folk records -- and that's more than many, many hundreds -- that I have devoured over the course of a lifetime spent trying to satiate my appetite for the stuff. Count this one among the all-timers.