It's hard to believe this tune comes from 1960, and not 1970, but that mostly tells us something about the profound impact of Elmore James, "king of the slide guitar," on the "classic rock" era, from Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac to the Allman Brothers. It's one of the bitter ironies of 20th-century popular music that the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Jeff Beck Group, Rory Gallagher, Savoy Brown (and later Foghat) and many others were so completely indebted to a small handful of African-American blues composers, singers and guitarists, from Robert Johnson to Willie Dixon to Sam Lightin' Hopkins as well as James--none of whom reaped the same financial rewards due to the vicious racism of the American apartheid state from the end of Reconstruction until its dismantling during the 1960s. It's probably not accidental that it was young white working class kids in Britain who first took up this music, since they were less infected with American-style race consciousness (the most striking exception on this side of the Atlantic were the Allman Brothers, though they were also an interracial band in the South when that was not exactly, shall we say, fashionable). Anyway, here's a number the Allman Brothers later made famous for white audiences, but I still prefer James's version.
And here's an even more obscure but brilliant performance, the instrumental "Blacksnake Blues" from 1963, the year of his far too early death:
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