Siobhán Long meets Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the Woody Guthrie protege who has toured with Bob Dylan, but insists he's not interested in politics, just music.

'I've hardly ever heard a sea-shanty sung well," he declares, with an unexpected gusto and what transpires to be an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things marine, from square riggers to capsizable catamarans to the Jeannie Johnston. "Fact is, I'm much more interested in boats than I am in music. The people I've heard do sea shanties sang them like an opera singer, but those sailors sang those shanties with very rough voices, and the rhythm was what was important because that helped them to pull together, in time."

Ramblin' Jack Elliott doesn't play much by the rules: he's a cowboy singer who loves to sail, a traveller who evidently relishes nothing better than stopping dead in his tracks to listen to a local story, and an acolyte of Woody Guthrie who insists that politics has never interested him.

Elliott still carries the hallmark of his New York upbringing: urbane, articulate and unfailingly interested in history as much as geography, he has made a living variously as a sailor, airline pilot, diesel mechanic and rodeo hand. He's credited by Bob Dylan (who affords him an expansive four pages in his autobiography, Chronicles Vol. 1) with bringing the songs and stories of Woody Guthrie to a new generation back in the 1950s and 1960s.

Elliott even joined Dylan on his "Rolling Thunder Review" tour, but his footloose troubadour tendencies ensured that he never did hitch his wagon in one place or with one person for very long.

Finding himself at the receiving end of a BBC Radio 2 Lifetime Achievement Award earlier this month, Ramblin' Jack decided to delay his return across the Atlantic so that he could include a handful of live performances on both sides of the Irish sea.

Although this was Elliott's first pair of paying gigs in Ireland, it wasn't his first visit here. He and his first wife visited in 1955 and spent a few nights on the Aran Islands. He did, in fact, sing in Dublin, in Radio Éireann, where the extravagant currency of payment was a pint of Guinness.

Oddly, Elliott insists that it was his love of sailing that gave him his itchy feet, not any innate cowboy instinct for the trail. But his instinct for good storytelling was what drew him to Woody Guthrie, whom he visited in Guthrie's home in Howard Beach, New York, and where, as Woody's wife Marjorie joked, he stayed for two years.

Although fame and infamy were bestowed on Guthrie in later years, Ramblin' Jack's mission back in 1951 was simply to meet the man behind the songs.

"Back when I met him, he wasn't that well known," he insists. "He was well-known to certain politically-minded people who cared about working people, and of course he was famous for having done a lot of union organising and he wrote a lot of great songs about working folks and starvin' folks and fruit-picking people and miners. He had even recorded in the Library of Congress with Alan Lomax as far back as 1940 or 1941, but I didn't know anything about that at the time. I was 19 and he was 39, and he was an itchy-footed hobo traveller like myself. He'd seen a lot of hardship and a lot of sadness, and he wrote about it."

Elliott learned a lot from Woody Guthrie, but he doesn't number the art of songwriting among them. "I'd like to call myself a singer/songwriter, but I've only written about four songs in 40 years," he declares. "I think to be a songwriter, you should write at least a song a week."

Would Woody Guthrie have subscribed to this rule of thumb? Ramblin' Jack laughs at the prospect. "Agree with me? Woody Guthrie didn't agree with anybody - about anything," he recalls. "He was a very disagreeable guy. He had his own ideas about everything. He was cantankerous as hell, but I was his devoted friend, partner and sidekick. I got on pretty well with him because I'd never argue with him."

Ramblin' Jack Elliot sees Bob Dylan as the embodiment of Guthrie's spirit, a musician who's never been slow to remind generations of music fans of the stories of Sacco and Vanzetti, tales of hard travellin' and all the other seminal tales captured so well in Guthrie's songs. "He carried on in Woody's footsteps far more than I did," Elliott acknowledges without pause. To follow in Woody's path, you'd have to be writing songs, and I mostly covered other people's songs. I'm a folk singer, or a singer of folk songs. Bob Dylan's style of putting words together was very strongly influenced by Woody. He could put words together in a very poetic manner, where the irony was brought out by the lack of rhyming, and other little tricks that Woody was a past master at.

"While others were writing songs that were sponsored by gangsters, or in order to push a product, Bob was writing to speak his own mind - freely. That's what the appeal is. It appeals to people who are aware that the world is changing all too rapidly for the worse. And of course, the art of it is to be able to write about that with humour."

Elliott wears his American roots lightly, as his rich appreciation of irony testifies. Ramblin' by name and ramblin' by nature, he ambles through picaresque and circuitous introductions to his songs, frequently detouring to relate unlikely tales of faithful canines with a penchant for car driving, the perils of (canine) euthanasia and similar matters of global import.

It's a style that readily seduces his packed house in Whelan's, his grasp of the role of silence as a punchline surpassing anything we've ever witnessed among US artists in the past; his repertoire is two parts satire, one part homage to times fast disappearing.

And satire is an essential defence, Elliott insists, in these politically charged times that we live in. "We're living in a time that's probably the scariest time I've ever seen," he reckons. "We're close to being able to kill all life on the planet, and the people who seem to want to do it don't seem to be very smart or very capable. They've got the money and the power to do it. That's bad."

Finding himself straying into the world of politics, Elliott shifts uncomfortably. He has reached the point at which he diverges most from the world view of both Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. "I've never been interested in politics really," he admits. "I listened to Woody rant and rave about politics for five years and I remained totally interested in boats and trucks, trucks and boats - and a little bit of music.

"Yes, I played some of Woody's songs, and I embraced his style of singing too, because it was not trying to sound pretty like some of the popular singers of the day. It was just the true story. To tell a true story, I don't think you have to sound like Pavarotti or Bing Crosby."