For Eleanor Ellis, her musical
career was what happened while she was doing what she liked to
do. Fortuitously, what she likes to do – creating, recreating, preserving
and performing basic
American blues – is also what she believes in. And what she does well.
Ellis grew up in Louisiana near New Orleans, a region where the music, like
the food, is spicy and
multicultural. As a youngster Ellis soon got her ears around the blues blasting
out from local radio stations.
The bent notes, the growling, wailing inflections and the mixture of irony and
humor that ran
through the lyrics entranced Ellis, moving her to ask her parents for a guitar.
But it wasn’t until she
was older, living in New Orleans and working at Tulane University cataloging
vintage recordings at
the Jazz Archive, that she began to take seriously the instrument she would
later call her “second
voice.”
During this time Ellis was exploring several forms of the roots music which
had always attracted her. A
bluegrass jam session led to musical collaboration with “Delta Rambler”
Hazel Schlueter and Ellis later
wound up playing stand-up bass in two bluegrass bands, the Green Valley Cutups
and Bill Malone’s
Hill Country Ramblers. At solo gigs in the French Quarter and small uptown coffeehouses
she played
a mix of blues, old-time and country, with a few obscure contemporary songs
thrown in. This led to
her first taste of street musicianship in the Big Easy, and the music people
she bumped into at Mardi
Gras became lifelong friends and encouraged her to further develop her talents.
Ellis might have stayed
close to home, but fate decreed that she visit the Washington
DC area in 1976 when the Hill Country
Ramblers got a couple of gigs there. She
decided to stay, drawn to the depth and breadth of musical
expression pouring out of the mid-Atlantic scene. next page