FOUNDERS KEEPERS: After the Fire is Gone; The Last Sessions of Bluesman Elmore James

It began here, in the safety of the suburbs, black vinyl spinning in someone’s back room, George Harrison bragging on John Lennon during the bridge in the Beatles’ “For You Blue,” a minor track from 1970’s Let It Be“: “Elmore James got nothin’ on this, baby.”

Elmore James was 45 when he died of a heart attack on May 24, 1963, while staying with his cousin Homesick James in Chicago, with his first tour of Europe weeks away. He was, thus, in 1970, in no position to defend himself, nor to take advantage of the boast. Harrison, who started the song while staying with Bob Dylan in Woodstock, in 1968, described it as a country blues, which wasn’t James’ calling card, and apparently assumed that all rock slide guitar flowed from the legacy of one relatively obscure bluesman.

A lot of it did.

It just didn’t sound like Lennon’s elegant, diffident, delicate picking.

It sounded rather more like the assault which opens and flows throughout the 1968 debut Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, because Peter Green was a full-tilt Elmore James acolyte who then added two more — Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan — to the original lineup, before they all faded into one kind of madness or another.

It sounded more like George Thorogood’s second album, Move It On Over, from 1978, a remarkable gateway drug with three tracks associated with Elmore James, plus nods to Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley. But three nods to Elmore James. Three.

All of that one can now learn, now, spending a few minutes on Wikipedia. But growing up, we were fumbling for fragments, leaning on the counter at Second Time Around trading lore, studying liner notes, following producers and labels and guesses. And we read the scholarship: Paul Oliver, Samuel Charters, Peter Guralnick, Leroi Jones, Albert Murray.

But even in those pages Elmore James was a whisper, a rumor, not what those chronicling folk (or jazz) purity sought because his guitar was loud and brash, because his first hit in 1952 was an electric cover of Robert Johnson’s “Dust My Broom,” a bowdlerization; because he recorded variations on the same handful of songs for several labels (Trumpet, Modern, Chess, Chief, Vee-Jay, Fire) and they, too, were often adjacent to the track which gave his backing band its name, The Broomdusters.

It does seem unfair. Generations of rock guitarists became famous copping Robert Johnson’s songs, but another Black musician — who may actually have known the legend — is diminished for doing it first, and better?

That is rather a long way to come for our assigned text: a new two-disc summary of Elmore James’ final years with Fire/Enjoy, Hits & Rarities (Sunset Blvd./Fire). The cover illustration also adorns a 2019 set titled The Sky Is Crying: The Ultimate Collection, just to add to an already confused catalogue. It seems likely, listening, that these are some of the singles which reached England and fueled the blues invasion which followed, from Alexis Korner to John Mayall to Led Zeppelin.

(Let’s pause here, because, yes, there is cultural appropriation to consider. But, if it’s possible, listen to the music and how it is passed from player to player, listen to what the players said about it, how it resonated, drew them in, fed them. And remember that the London in which those future legends grew up was a bombed out wreck of a place, bleak with rationing and poverty, broken families and missing limbs. So, yes, it made sense, the blues they heard, even if the future guitar gods understood its context poorly and the suits knew how best to exploit absent musicians.)

The disc of hits goes a long way toward explaining Elmore James’ influence, and it may be as much the guitar/amplifier set-up he built as how he played it: Loud and high and raspy, overwhelming horns and drums and whatever else might be clustered around him in studios. His play style is deceptively simple, hitting a chord fast and often, well up the neck, long, staccato bursts with only slight, subtle variation, and a smart bit of single-string riffing before and after. The stuff of dreams.

And that voice. It matches the rig he’s playing — loud and high and raspy. Cocky, even. When he sings “I believe my time ain’t long,” recording “Dust My Broom” yet again, he knows the truth of it deep in his failing heart. His lyrics are very much of the folk tradition, borrowed and cobbled and improvised, but they are also concise and precise and strikingly effective.

His work from the early 1950s swings, if gently. “The Sky Is Crying” barely tries. It favors blunt force trauma, late night music for a club of single men smoking and drinking alone, none of them looking at each other because then a fight would break out. Oh, but these cuts rock, slowly, back and forth, sawing across the hurt until it can’t be felt any more.

His guitar prowess shows better on loping tracks like the instrumental “Baby’s Rock,” or “Something Inside Me,” or “Bleeding Heart.” Here he’s playing more runs, is more collaborative and less dominant. But that’s not where the power is, nor the lure across the pond. The lure is in “Dust My Broom” and “Fine Little Mama” and even “Baby Please Set a Date.” All of that contains the seeds of the British Invasion, and much of what followed.

The songs on the second disc are largely a different matter. These recordings are new, to me. Rumor and brag long suggested that James was so ill that somebody else (presumably Homesick James) was obliged to play guitar parts on his final sessions. Maybe. At a minimum his vocals tell us he wasn’t as strong, and some of the guitar work doesn’t sound like the Elmore James of legend.

The second disc opens with his version of Robert Johnson’s “Standing at the Crossroads,” followed by the debut of what is apparently a Sonny Boy Williamson II co-write, “One Way Out,” later taken for a fine ride by the Allmans. “My Kind of Woman” is painfully ordinary and could have been played by anybody. By the time we get to the reprise of his earlier hit, “Twelve Year Old Boy,” the opening phase, “I feel bad/I feel terrible” sounds about right. The guitar does not. It’s fine, it’s just not…it’s not the same distinctive rig, and it’s not the same powerfully assertive player. Same with his “Shake Your Moneymaker,” which nevertheless features a superb and surprisingly subtle vocal-guitar interplay. But if you came for the fire (sorry), this is just a fierce, final ember.

He deserved better every step of the way.