Elmore James’s influence stretched far and wide.
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.”