K8 fan at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

Born Elliott Adnopoz to a Brooklyn surgeon, he ran off at fifteen to join a rodeo and came back a folk singer, absorbing Woody Guthrie's songs and phrasing so completely that Guthrie said he sounded more like himself than Guthrie did. He carried that inheritance to a young Bob Dylan, who was briefly nicknamed Elliott's "son" around Greenwich Village and later credited him in his memoir Chronicles. Elliott toured Europe, joined Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, won a Grammy in 1995 for South Coast, and received the National Medal of Arts in 1998.