Legendary folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott will perform Tuesday at the Tower Theatre in Bend.

People still quote Johnny Cash’s introduction of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott from September 1969, when Elliott appeared on “The Johnny Cash Show”:

“Nobody I know, and I mean nobody, has covered more ground and made more friends and sung more songs than the fella you’re about to meet right now,” Cash said. “He’s got a song and a friend for every mile behind him.”

At 82, Elliott is still rambling, still playing guitar and sharing songs and stories.

His upcoming performance Tuesday at the Tower Theatre in Bend (see “If you go”) provides an opportunity to see and hear a living folk legend whose long list of friends included Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, among countless others who are not nearly as famous.

Elliott’s lifetime of travel, adventure and music began at age 14, when he ran away from his Brooklyn home — and wound up in the rodeo.

“I didn’t have a plan,” he said in a phone interview with GO! last week. “I just wanted to go away. I was with a couple of other school chums who had also run away.”

His accomplishments are scattered across the decades, during which he released dozens of albums, won Grammys and a National Medal of Arts. He learned the blues from Leadbelly. He championed Bob Dylan, and knows how to play a Dylan song replete with Dylan’s nasally slurred speech.

Though Elliott said he hates to travel now, he can still ramble in his stories, as this reporter learned during a 45-minute interview.

The process is a fascinating journey for a willing listener. An Elliott story about his rodeo days may branch off into separate little offshoots about certain cowboys or horses he rode before he circles back to the gist, almost like a beautiful guitar solo that eventually finds its way back to the core of the song.

His love of rodeos had begun at age 9, in 1940, when his parents took him to a rodeo starring Gene Autry at Madison Square Garden.

The rodeo fixation was cemented the following year, when his father took him to another rodeo there shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Outside an employee entrance, he spotted a bona fide cowboy who said hello and shook his hand. Unlike Autry, this cowboy’s shirt did not sport flowers.

“I was thrilled,” Elliott said. “I took one look and went, ‘Wow, this is the real thing.’ And I was very disappointed in Gene Autry. I got interested in the real cowboys.”

However, he was also interested in becoming a writer. The friends he ran away with at 14 were poets, and Elliott fancied himself a writer as well, envisioning his future self in a tweed jacket with leather patches, seated at a typewriter.

“I do have a typewriter (now), but I’ve hardly ever been able to get the damn thing to work. I’m not good with computers at all. I’m good with old trucks and young horses,” he said.

He’s pretty good with a guitar and a song, too. “His tone of voice is sharp, focused and piercing,” Dylan himself wrote of Elliott in “Chronicles: Volume One.” “All that and he plays the guitar effortlessly in a fluid flat-picking perfected style. He was a brilliant entertainer … Jack was King of the Folksingers.”

Elliott learned to play guitar from a couple of rodeo cowboys. Elliott’s rodeo career — he was a saddle bronc rider — was short, but clearly influential on his development. He made money from competition just once, in 1951, when he earned $12 “for falling off a bareback horse,” he said. (The entry fee was $25.)

That was also the year when, at age 19, he met famed folk singer Woody Guthrie. Guitarist Tom Paley, of New Lost City Ramblers, had given him Guthrie’s number. “(Paley) played with Woody many times,” Elliott said.

Guthrie was home when Elliott called. “I told him I sure did like his music, and I was a friend of Tom’s and Tom had given me the phone number. He said, ‘Well, come on over and bring your guitar, and we’ll knock off a couple of tunes together. But don’t come today, I’ve got a bellyache.’

“What he had was a very severe case of appendicitis, and they rushed him to the hospital,” Elliott recalled. He ended up visiting Guthrie for the first time at the hospital. “I brought my guitar along; I thought maybe I could play him a song. I got the guitar out and I said, ‘Would you like to hear a little music?’”

Guthrie’s roommate had just come out of the operating room, and so Guthrie ushered Elliott to his apartment across the street to meet his family. This story led into Elliott’s recollection of hitching a ride, immediately after leaving the apartment, to a friend’s going away party in Westport, Conn. The friend asked him to help drive to California.

“My motto was ‘Never say no,’” Elliott said. “I threw my guitar in the back of the car.”

He would eventually move in with the Guthrie family, and accompany Woody on travels around the country. In 1954, he traveled with other folk singers around Appalachia, and in 1955, Elliott released the first in a string of albums, the six-song record “Woody Guthrie’s Blues.” (It was later reissued, with more songs, as “Talkin’ Woody Guthrie.”)

Though he’s written plenty of songs — Johnny Cash recorded “Cup of Coffee,” which is considered one of the first trucking songs — Elliott is known more as a raconteur and “interpretive troubadour,” as his Wikipedia page refers to him.

When he told GO! he no longer likes to travel, it could have been the cold talking. He’d been waylaid by it since a late-summer tour of Colorado. On the way back to his home in California when, coming over Donner Pass, the driver of the tour car sneezed.

“I knew it was a dangerous sneeze,” Elliott said. The next day, he came down with a cold. “I’ve been in bed for a month,” he said.

He promises he’ll be better for his Tower show Tuesday. Elliott could not say what he plans to play.

“I don’t plan shows ahead of time. I work the room,” he said, “which means I don’t know anything until I get there. It depends on who they are. They help me make a good show. I’m singing to them, and they’re giving their appreciatin’ back to me … it’s a happening.”