Elmore James - Dust My Broom

A Rite of Passage

1. Once while motoring over the Coronado Bridge in my two-tone black and tangerine-flake 1964 Plymouth Fury, reveling in 3,400 pounds of rumbling V8-powered Motor City heavy metal and letting Elmore’s Dust My Broom assault me at a powerful volume, my buddy Jake looked at me and asked, “Do you just always feel this cool?” Yes, when I play Elmore James, I always feel cool. The car helps. Cool is currency, and by that measure, Black musicians are Elon Musk. Just playing their music makes you 75% cooler. It’s science. I know for a FACT global warming and climate change are real because Elmore James, Miles Davis, and Prince are dead. This place cannot POSSIBLY be as cool as it once was. Global warming must have started sometime in 1974 shortly after Duke Ellington died. Black musicians had been keeping the world cool as the other side of the pillow, and Elmore James’ version of Dust My Broom is a polar ice cap. Why?

2. That riff. That’s fucking why. That riff… I said GOTDAMN! I don’t know how many synonyms there are for rude, but I could exhaust them all and probably not approximate what that baaaaad man from Mississippi by way of Chicago did here. Let’s use three of them: surly, abusive, and raw. That’ll do. It’s also wildly instructive. It became the finishing school for would-be badasses. “You got chops, huh? Let’s hear Dust My Broom.” There’s no on-ramp to the song - it starts in fifth gear and doesn’t let up. It’s a rocket sled to slide Blues sublimity. That lick, combined with James’ own tinkerings with amplification, hacked a swath directly into the heavy rock of the late ‘60s, and didn’t we all reap the rewards? On Dust My Broom Elmore, as he apparently always did, emptied the tank. He just went for it, and frankly, given the nature of that riff, one must absolutely rise to the occasion. You cannot hold back, and that, I think, is why I love it so much. It requires absolute commitment, what Deadpool would call “maximum effort.” You have to reach down before the song even begins and find those surly, abusive, and raw things inside. Those things aren’t in everyone, which is why there are so many half-assed Bluesmen out there.

3. To be sure, this is a Robert Johnson song, and Robert is the Old God of Delta Blues (I’ll write about him later), but Elmore added his own touches to the lyrics. Specifically:

   I believe
   I believe my time ain't long

   Elmore died at 45 in Chicago. He wrote his version based on the Robert Johnson standard and recorded it when he was 33. Do you have any idea what kind of life leads to writing a lyric like THAT at 33 years old? The anguish and the roar in Elmore’s voice is, in a word, convincing. He believes his time ain’t long and I believe him. THAT’S the key to the Blues. It’s about conviction. As much as the players need to believe, we have to believe them. There are so many half-assed Bluesmen because they can’t or won’t convince us. Stevie Ray Vaughan had it. Rory Gallagher had it. Roy Buchanan had it. Stevie died at 35, Rory at 47, and Roy at 48. All of them went to Sunday school at the Church of Elmore James. All of them knew Dust My Broom because they felt that anguish and that roar. I believe all of them, but I especially believe Elmore. I only wish I didn’t.