Ellen McIlwaine

Ellen McIlwaine stood out as a bold and energetic guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose intense style of blues distinguished her from nearly all other women working in the genre. Missionaries raised her, and she lived her first fifteen years in Japan, where she started playing piano at five and performed with a church choir. During junior high she tuned into U.S. Armed Forces Radio broadcasts and grew deeply attached to the sounds of Fats Domino, Ray Charles, and Professor Longhair. At seventeen she came back to the United States with her parents and enrolled first at King College in Bristol, Tennessee, then at DeKalb College in Atlanta. After two years she dropped out and launched her professional career in Atlanta in 1966.

Folksinger Patrick Sky caught her act soon after she turned professional and urged her to relocate to New York City. His manager arranged early appearances at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, where she appeared alongside Jimi Hendrix, John Lee Hooker, and Howlin' Wolf. Richie Havens and Randy California passed along some slide-guitar techniques that she quickly developed on her own. She returned to Atlanta and assembled her first band, Fear Itself, becoming both the lead guitarist and the principal singer—an unusual arrangement at the time for an all-male backing group. The following year the musicians traveled with her to New York to cut their self-titled debut album for Dot Records.

Her next two releases, Honky Tonk Angel in 1972 and We the People in 1973, appeared on Polydor. In 1975 she recorded The Real Ellen McIlwaine for the Canadian imprint Kot'Ai. Though later releases came at irregular intervals, her live shows kept their characteristic drive. Additional albums before the turn of the century were the 1978 self-titled set on United Artists, Everybody Needs It issued by Blind Pig in 1982, and Looking for Trouble, released on Stony Plain in 1988. After an extended stay in Connecticut she moved to Toronto, Ontario, in the late 1980s and later settled in Alberta. Her 2000s output comprised Spontaneous Combustion in 2001, the Japanese issue Live at Yellow in 2002, and the 2006 album Mystic Bridge, an Eastern-inflected project featuring Cassius Khan on tablas and Linsey Wellman on saxophone. Ellen McIlwaine died of esophageal cancer on June 23, 2021, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, at the age of seventy-five.