Tinsley Ellis showed, across the length of 2005’s Live! Highwayman, that he could expand well outside the every-day language of the blues. If he came off something like Stevie Ray Vaughan on “To the Devil for a Dime,” then he also brought in the flavors of David Gilmour on the soaring conclusion to “A Quitter Never Wins.” You hear the echoes of Waylon Jennings in “The Next Miss Wrong,” right alongside a classic B.B. King vibe on the title track.
That said, “Pawnbroker” remains a titanic reminder of what Ellis can do when he bores in on his own blues voicings. Reissued digitally this week via Alligator Records as part of The Best of Tinsley Ellis, the song undergoes a bold expansion of his three-and-a-half minute original, as heard on 1989’s Fanning the Flames.
Once the Atlanta-born Ellis is done, “Pawnbroker” has billowed to more than 10 scalding minutes, giving him ample room to dig down into its brown-bottle well of emotion before an appreciative crowd at Chord on Blues in St. Charles, Illinois — and every moment counts. You hear him return, as expected, to principal Fanning the Flames influence Stevie Ray Vaughan, but by the mid-2000s Ellis was boldly incorporating a number of other influences, and to make them his own. Southern rock, Memphis soul and the unclassifiable Texas genius of Gatemouth Brown begin to bubble to the fore.
Comparing the two versions is instructive. It’s as if Ellis is coming into his own, right there on stage, with each successive fire-kissed bar. And this formidable take on “Pawnbroker” is but one recommended moment, as Alligator collects some 83 minutes of music for this new compilation — some of it from his earliest recordings and others, like this track, from a period in which Tinsley Ellis had begun to sound like no one so much as himself.
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