📍Holmes County, MS, USA
1918 – 1937“I was born Elmore Brooks in January 1918 in Richland, in Holmes County, Mississippi, on the eastern edge of the Delta, where the hills meet the flat cotton land. My mother, Leola Brooks, was a fifteen-year-old field hand, and the man who was probably my father, Joe Willie James, moved in with her, and I took his name. We were poor, and we moved from farm to farm around Holmes County, working in the fields. When I was about twelve, I made my first instrument, a diddley bow, a single strand of broom wire nailed to the wall of our shack, and I slid a bottle along it to change the notes. Later I made a guitar with several strings out of a lard can. By my teens I had a real guitar, and I played at dances and juke joints around Holmes County under the names Cleanhead and Joe Willie James. I loved the slide guitar of Kokomo Arnold and Tampa Red. In the late 1930s, around Belzoni, I played with Robert Johnson and with Sonny Boy Williamson, and Robert showed me his Dust My Broom, which became my song. After serving in the navy in the Second World War, I worked in my brother's radio repair shop in Canton, Mississippi, where I experimented with amplifiers to get a louder, rougher sound. In 1951 I recorded Dust My Broom, with its famous slide riff, which became a hit. In Chicago I played with my band, the Broomdusters, and recorded The Sky Is Crying and Shake Your Moneymaker. They called me the King of the Slide Guitar, and I inspired Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Brothers.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
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