ELMORE JAMES
Jimmy Page said James’s slide tone “knocked you flat”. He was far from being the only one floored by it.
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.”