ELMORE JAMES
Jimmy Page said James’s slide tone “knocked you flat”. He was far from being the only one floored by it.
The few surviving photographs of the sharp-suited young man with the easy smile (now a long-term resident of Newport Baptist Church Cemetery, Mississippi) are old and faded now. But the sound of Elmore James attacking a slide guitar remains one of the most neck-tingling experiences the blues genre has to offer, still unsurpassed by the celebrity covers that sought to leave their thumbprint on what was already perfect. As Jimmy Page – who had once wrestled with Dust My Broom in a teenage shift with Neil Christian And The Crusaders – once noted: “It knocked you flat.”
For James, necessity was the mother of invention. As a child he’d played his first notes on a traditional diddley bow (little more than a length of wire stretched between two nails). After US Navy service interrupted his early career – leaving him working in a Mississippi electricals shop – James reclaimed the lost ground by pimping his acoustic guitar with a DeArmond pickup, pairing it with a small valve amp, and creating the fit-to-burst tone from the near-mythical 1951 session for Trumpet Records. Suggesting not so much a guitar lick as a freight train racing past with its whistle screaming, there are few more thrilling tones – then or now – than James’s overdriven slide intro to Dust My Broom. Frank Zappa’s affectionate snipe (“He only had one lick, but you had the feeling that he really meant it!”) wasn’t quite accurate. Slower in tempo but perhaps more intense was 1959’s The Sky Is Crying, featuring sublime shivers of slide that not even Stevie Ray Vaughan could eclipse with his version a quarter-century later.
A hard drinker with a heart condition, James knew he wouldn’t make old bones, but when he perished in May 1963, at the early age of 45, his spirit might have seethed at the cruelty of the timing. A year earlier, the inaugural American Folk Blues Festival had brought the forgotten US originators back from obscurity to a European audience, with acolytes including Eric Clapton and Keith Richards paying forward the influence as the British blues boom erupted. But Elmore missed the party – and the plaudits. HY
Listen to this: Dust My Broom (Elmore James, single, 1951)