When
Tinsley Ellis first came to the Mississippi Valley Blues Festival in
1989, he was just beginning his solo career. "I just remember we
were a new band out of Georgia, got the deal with Alligator
[Records], and the blues society booked a concert there," he said.
"We started off that concert by being like, I think, one of the
first bands to play of the day, and now, here I am being the closing
act of the main stage."
After almost 20 years, Ellis returns to the IH Mississippi Valley Blues Festival, where he will perform July 5 on the main stage. Ellis' music is "pitched somewhere between the exhilarating volatility of rock and roll and the melancholic passion of urban blues," the Los Angeles Times said. Because of his energetic guitar playing and blues and rock combination, Ellis has been compared to Stevie Ray Vaughan.
He is also known for his soulful songwriting. On his latest album, Moment of Truth, Ellis tackles issues of addiction, broken relationships, and living on the road.
The track "Get to the Bottom" is about a friend who was struggling with substance abuse, Ellis said. He was so worked up about the issue that he wrote the lyrics down as if he were writing a letter, he said. Ellis describes his friend getting up in the morning, singing: "Your eyes are red from the sleepless nights / Peak out the curtains see the morning light / The birds are singing sound like Judgment Day / I recall how it was to live that way."
Ellis, who was born in Atlanta in 1957, grew up in southern Florida listening to acts such as the Allman Brothers, Freddie King, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. Of all of the styles he grew up with and enjoys, "the common denominator is guitar," he said.
Ellis began playing the guitar when he was eight years old. After he saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, he begged his parents for a guitar so he could be famous like the British band, Ellis said.
However, the turning point toward the blues came when he attended a B.B. King concert when he was a teenager. King was doing a week-long stand in a North Miami Beach lounge, and the concert Ellis attended was a show just for kids, he said. Ellis sat at the front table with his friends about a seat away from King.
In the middle of a song, King broke a guitar string, and handed it to Ellis, who kept it as a souvenir. "I've got it right here, just a matter of a few feet away from me, taped to a picture postcard that he was giving out," Ellis said.
Before the concert, Ellis hadn't listened to B.B. King, he said. "I just heard people like the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton talk about him ... ," Ellis said. "I just knew that if they liked him, that I better check it out and see what it's all about, and I understood where they were coming from after seeing him."
King's emotion was one of the things that struck Ellis. "The way he bent the guitar strings," he said. "He would sing a line and then play it, answer it, on his guitar. That's all the stuff that I liked about bands like Cream or the Allman Brothers."
King's accessibility and casual attitude also made a big impression on Ellis. "And that's what I remember more than anything else about that concert was that he stood out there and greeted all the kids and shook our hands and stuff," Ellis said. "It's a personal touch you get with blues artists."
Ellis tries to do similar things at his own concerts, such as playing his guitar as if he's "replying" to his lyrics, turning his wrist while holding down a guitar string to alter the pitch, and meeting his fans, he said: "I use that [B.B. King concert] as a model for what I hope that I'm trying to be like at my concerts, that I'm able to entertain people, and then maybe, shake their hands if they want to."
