Actor and musician Juan Candido Washington Landron was born in 1938 in Puerto Rico but grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood of Roxbury. While attending Boston's Emerson College (as a theater arts major), he began singing in the local coffeehouses under the name Jackie Washington, quickly establishing himself as one of the most charismatic performers on the Cambridge folk scene during the advent of the folk revival in the early '60s. He was soon signed to Vanguard Records and began performing farther afield, especially in New York's Greenwich Village at venues such as Gerdes' Folk City and other friendly havens for the music. One of the songs in his repertory was a version of "Nottamun Town," a mountain song recorded and written by Jean Ritchie that he adapted musically to a minor key into his own style, with a droning sound on the guitar.

Among the audience members who heard him do this song was Bob Dylan, who asked to hear it several times, according to Washington in the Eric Von Schmidt book Baby Let Me Follow You Down. A while later, Dylan's "Masters of War," re-creating Washington's music from his version of "Nottamun Town," was released on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the album that established the latter's primacy in the contemporary folk music landscape. Washington talked of suing but evidently never did. He later took a savage swipe at Dylan's sound and his opportunistic streak, however, on "Long Black Cadillac" -- which sounded like a parody of "Like a Rolling Stone," in an electric arrangement by Felix Pappalardi, featuring the Youngbloods -- which was released in May 1967 on his LP Morning Song, his fourth for Vanguard. In the interim, he'd also released the live album Jackie Washington at Club 47 and the soul-flavored single "Why Don't They Let Me Be," all attracting relatively little attention.

A committed activist, Washington traveled south to work for black voter registration, serving as a personal assistant to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for a time before returning to New York to resume his acting career under the name Jack Landron. As an actor, he has worked with the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, the Negro Ensemble, the Caribbean American Repertory Theater, and the Free Southern Theater, and was a regular on NBC's Saturday morning television show The First Look. He continues to work as an actor in commercials, industrial films, and TV shows and has served as a board member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Little of his music is still in print, although three of his songs ("Freedom School," "Song for Ben Chaney," "Father's Grave"), attributed to Jackie Washington Landron, appear on the double CD called Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. ~ Bruce Eder & Steve Leggett, Rovi