Artist: Elmore James
Genre(s):
Other
Blues
Discography:
The Sky Is Crying
Year: 1997
Tracks: 20
Golden Hits
Year: 1996
Tracks: 20
Dust My Broom
Year: 1993
Tracks: 12
King Of The Slide Guitar CD4
Year:
Tracks: 17
King Of The Slide Guitar CD3
Year:
Tracks: 22
King Of The Slide Guitar CD2
Year:
Tracks: 16
King Of The Slide Guitar CD1
Year:
Tracks: 18
Blacksnake Blues
Year:
Tracks: 24
No two slipway some it, the to the highest degree influential slide guitar player of the postwar menses was Elmore James, manpower depressed. Although his early demise from fondness failure kept him from enjoying the fruits of the '60s megrims revival as his coevals Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf did, James left wing a wide influential train behind him. And that influence continues to the deliver metre -- in approach, attitude and tone -- in just now just about every guitar player world Health Organization puts a slide on his finger and wails the vapors. As a guitar player, he wrote the book, his slide style influencing the likes of Hound Dog Taylor, Joe Carter, his first cousin Homesick James and J.B. Hutto, piece his seldom-heard single-string figure out had an as profound effect on B.B. King and Chuck Berry. His signature lick -- an galvanizing updating of Robert Johnson's "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" and one that Elmore recorded in infinite variations from day one to his last sitting -- is so much a region of the essential megrims framework of guitar licks that no one attempting to play slide guitar can buoy do it without being compared to Elmore James. Others may have had more technique -- Robert Nighthawk and Earl Hooker at once come to head -- simply Elmore had the sound and all the feel.
A wireless service man by trade, Elmore reworked his guitar amplifiers in his unornamented metre, getting them to raise raw, deformed sounds that wouldn't resurface until the advent of heavy rock-and-roll amplification in the late '60s. This amp-on-11-approach was hot-wired to one of the strongest emotional approaches to the blues of all time recorded. There is never a fourth dimension when you're listening to one of his records that you feel -- no matter how familiar the structure -- that he's phoning it in just to seize a quick school term check. Elmore James always gave it everything he had, everything he could emotionally vest in a identification number. This allegiance of spirit is something that shows up metre and once again when hearing to multiple takes from his session masters. The sheer repetitiveness of the recording process would dim virtually anyone's originative fires, merely Elmore always seemed to give it 100 percent every sentence the redness light went on. Few megrims singers had a voice that could vie with James'; it was loud, emphatic, prone to "get" or break up in the high registers, well-nigh sounding on the threshold of hysterical neurosis at certain moments. Evidently the times plump for in the mid-'30s when Elmore had firsthand immersion of Robert Johnson as a playing companion had a deep influence on him, non only in his option of material, simply as well in his presentation of it.
Backup the twin torrents of Elmore's guitar and voice was one and only of the greatest -- and earliest -- Chicago blues bands. Named subsequently James' big hit, the Broomdusters featured Little Johnny Jones on piano, J.T. Brown on tenor adolphe Sax and Elmore's cousin-german, Homesick James on rhythm guitar. This talented nucleus was oft augmented by a second sax on occasion while the drumming stool changed oft. But this was the band that could go toe to toe in a battle of the megrims against the bands of Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf and always contain their own, if not take the air with the show. Utilizing a stomping beat, Elmore's slashing guitar, Jones' two-fisted piano delivery, Homesick's rudimentary boogie-woogie bass rhythm and Brown's braying nanny adolphe Sax leads, the Broomdusters were as tawdry and powerful and popular as any megrims band the Windy City had to offer.
Merely as urban as their sound was, it all had roots in Elmore's hometown of Canton, MS. He was born there on January 27, 1918, the illicit boy of Leola Brooks and by and by granted the cognomen of his stepfather, Joe Willie James. He adapted to music at an early long time, eruditeness to play constriction on a homemade musical instrument fashioned out of a broom wield and a embroider can. By the long time of 14, he was already a weekend musician, working the versatile nation suppers and juke joints in the surface area under the names "Cleanhead" or Joe' Willie James." Although he confined himself to a abode nucleotide area around Belzoni, he would join up and mold with travel players approach through and through like Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. By the late '30s he had formed his first band and was working the Southern state of matter area with Sonny Boy until the second gear earth war skint kO'd, outgo trio age stationed with the Navy in Guam. When he was dismissed, he picked off where he left field off, moving for a while to Memphis, functional in clubs with Eddie Taylor and his cousin-german Homesick James. Elmore was too unitary of the first "guest stars" on the popular King Biscuit Time radio receiver show on KFFA in Helena, AL, too doing stints on the Talaho Syrup render on Yazoo City's WAZF and the Hadacol render on KWEM in West Memphis.
Aflutter and unsure of his abilities as a recording artist, Elmore was surreptitiously recorded by Lillian McMurray of Trumpet Records at the tail end of a Sonny Boy session doing his now-signature tune, "Dust My Broom." Legend has it that James didn't even stay around long sufficiency to take heed the playback, much less record a second face. McMurray stuck a local vocalizer (BoBo "Slender" Thomas) on the flip slope and the record became the surprise R&B reach of 1951, making the Top Ten and conversely making a recording star kO'd of Elmore. With a few months left on his Trumpet narrow, Elmore was recorded by the Bihari Brothers for their Modern label subsidiaries, Flair and Meteor, merely the results were left wing in the tush until James' constrict ran out. In the lag, Elmore had touched to Chicago and cut a nimble session for Chess, which resulted in one single organism issued and only as quickly yanked off the market as the Bihari Brothers swooped in to protect their investment. This geological period of body process found Elmore aggregation the core group of his great band the Broomdusters and several fine recordings were issued over the next few years on a embarrassment of the Bihari Brothers'owned labels with several of them charting and almost all of them comely qualified blues classics.
By this time James had constituted a beachhead in the clubs of Chicago as one of the almost popular unrecorded acts and regularly broadcasting o'er WPOA under the aegis of disk chouse Big Bill Hill. In 1957, with his constrict with the Bihari Brothers at an end, he recorded several successful sides for Mel London's Chief label, all of them afterwards beingness issued on the larger Vee-Jay label. His health -- always in a frail state due to a revenant heart term -- would transport him back home to Jackson, MS, where he temporarily set away his playing for work as a disc jockey or radio recompense man. He came back to Chicago to track record a session for Chess, then just now as quickly stone-broke abridge to sign with Bobby Robinson's Fire label, producing the graeco-Roman "The Sky Is Crying" and legion others. Running foul with the Chicago musician's mating, he returned punt to Mississippi, doing roger Sessions in New York and New Orleans waiting for Big Bill Hill to sorting things extinct. In May of 1963, Elmore returned to Chicago, ready to re-start his on-again off-again playing calling -- his records were still being regularly issued and reissued on a variety of labels -- when he suffered his last marrow tone-beginning. His wake was attended by over 400 vapours luminaries in front his body was shipped indorse to Mississippi. He was elected to the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980 and was later elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a originative influence. Elmore James whitethorn non have lived to harvest the rewards of the vapours revival meeting, but his music and influence continues to resonate.
