Slide guitarist, singer Ellen McIlwaine dies

In the mid-1960s Ellen McIlwaine spent about a month playing in New York with a fellow guitarist whose musical tastes she shared, an undiscovered talent named Jimi Hendrix. They made an unusual pair, a white woman working on her slide-guitar skills and a Black guy developing his own flamboyant style. It was going pretty well, and she thought about formalizing the partnership.

“I talked to my manager about Hendrix,” McIlwaine recalled almost 30 years later in an interview with The Calgary Herald, “and wanting to get a group together, and he said: ‘Oh, I know who that is. He’s Black. You don’t want him in your group.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t want you for my manager.’”

That was the music scene at the time, bubbling with talent and experimentation, yet also still hindered by misguided ideas about who should be allowed to become a star.

“People back then thought like that,” McIlwaine said. “They’d even say things to me like, ‘Ellen, you can’t play the guitar because nobody will be able to look at your body while you sing.’”

Hendrix soon went to England and broke out of that box. McIlwaine became a dazzling slide guitarist and recorded a string of albums but never quite achieved the fame of female guitarists and singers like Bonnie Raitt and Chrissie Hynde, who were just a few years younger.

McIlwaine died on June 23 in Calgary, Alberta, where she had lived for years. She was 75.

The cause was esophageal cancer, her friend Sharron Toews said.

An international upbringing grounded McIlwaine in a wide array of musical influences, and her live shows put them all on display — sometimes she would sing a blues number in Japanese. Music critics and guitar aficionados appreciated her, but hits proved elusive.

McIlwaine said she started playing her signature slide guitar after seeing the guitarist Randy California, later of the band Spirit, at a club in New York and being struck by his unusual technique: He’d break the neck off a wine bottle and use it as a slide.

In the group Fear Itself, which played a brand of psychedelic blues and released a self-titled album in 1968, she was the rare female guitarist fronting an otherwise male band. But the band broke up after a few years, and in 1972 she released the first in a string of solo albums, “Honky Tonk Angel.”

Her most recent album, “Mystic Bridge,” a collaboration with the tabla virtuoso Cassius Khan, was released in 2006 on her own label, Ellen McIlwaine Music.

Frances Ellen McIlwaine was born on Oct. 1, 1945, in Nashville, Tennessee, and adopted as a baby by William and Aurine (Wilkens) McIlwaine. They were Methodist missionaries, and soon the family had relocated to Kobe, Japan, where she attended a Canadian international school.

Her parents got a piano when she was young, and by 5 she was playing it.

She returned to the United States in 1963.