When I started fooling around on the guitar
I had a really cheap, fucked up instrument with a plywood body and a neck that was kind of loose and skew so that
the strings were really high off the frets, making it difficult and painful to
attempt to play chords. Because I was heavily into blues the solution was to
play slide guitar, or at least my untutored take on it, using a piece of metal
tubing I found in our garage.
At that point I had read about slide guitar
but had no clue of the technique required or the chordal structure or
progressions of any music, much less the blues. I was just making a noise in my
room, approximating what I heard on record without knowing what I was doing or
was supposed to be doing.
My main influence, or source, was the
Elmore James style slide tunes played by the early Fleetwood Mac, who played
“Shake Your Moneymaker” and “Dr Brown”
and the like, which were either James tunes or slide blues in the style of
James. The basic Elmore James slide riff, as epitomised by “Dust My Broom”, is a
powerful, almost primitive thing, completely unlike the much more subtle work
of, say, Ry Cooder or Duane Allman, and could be unbelievably exciting backed
by a stomping shuffle, with our without horn riffs. My version of it was simplistic
and obviously way off the mark. I just had no idea of how to imitate that
signature slide lick.
The closest I got to it was when I recorded
some of my attempts on a very cheap cassette recorder with low battery
strength. The result was a distorted, over amped sound that made my cheap
acoustic sound electric and vibrant. It was the best thing I ever recorded back
then. Much later I read how the Rolling Stones employed much the same technique
in recording songs like “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man” where
the guitars are acoustic and it is the
method of recording through a small tape recorder that gives the music the big
sound. Apparently, in the case of Elmore
James, his signature sound was at least partly due to the fat that he was playing
an amplified hollow body guitar and not a straightforward electric guitar.
A couple of years into my record collection
I took stock and realised that I could probably fill both sides of a C90
cassette tape with various versions of “Dust My Broom” taken from several
records in my collection. It was perhaps a project I should have attempted but
somehow never did. This song did seem to be ubiquitous in blues
recordings. I could have started with
the Robert Johnson version from King of the Delta Blues Singers and
ended, at that time, with the ZZ Top take on the venerable classic on Deguello. It's a pity that Elmore, who claimed to have
written the song, did not live long enough to be able to live off the
royalties.
Jeremy Spencer of the blues version of
Fleetwood Mac made an entire career out of imitation the slide and vocal styles
of Elmore James and I must confess that
these rambunctious slide workouts, particularly on the Blue Horizon double
album Fleetwood Mac: The Vintage Years,
were the tasty little numbers, more than the introspective Peter Green
compositions, that made Fleetwood Mac my top favourite White blues band. The
signature raucous Elmore James style
reminded me of what someone said
about Albert King: the riffs are basic and limited and basically you know from
tune to tune exactly what you're going to get but, damn, each time the ferocity
of the attack is just stunning and awesome.
George Thorogood is another
example of a young White blues musician
who was obviously in thrall to the Elmore James style (although not
exclusively) when he started out.
Nor everything that James recorded was an
imitation of “Dust My Broom” although there plenty variations on this theme,
and if one listens to a collection of tracks from James one is pleasantly
surprised by the variety in rhythms and textures.
One of the reasons why Elmore James ranks
amongst the all-time top ten, if not top five, of bluesmen is that so many of
his compositions are standards recorded by so many other bluesmen and women
down the years. “Dust My Broom” is only one of many. Just off the top of my
head there are also “It Hurts Me Too,” “The Sky Is Crying,” “Stranger Blues,”
“Got to Move,” “Bleeding Heart” and “Shake Your Moneymaker.” Elmore's big, tough, raw voice was one of
the most impassioned in blues. It was nothing like the watchful, deceptive calm
of the Muddy Waters approach and in its very tortured extreme Elmore made
Howlin’ Wolf sound like a lounge singer. Perhaps not really, but Elmore's
passion seemed born of deep hurt whereas Wolf's passion seemed born of tough defiance.
It would be odious to rank blues people
into a top ten or into a hierarchy but if one were to do that Elmore would
comfortably fit into that top ten, perhaps even the top five. He was that good
and that important. No blues collection of any worth could fail to have at
least one good, broad ranging compilation of Elmore James tunes.
