Interview: Tinsley Ellis Contemporary Blues Rock Legend

By Martine Ehrenclou

World renowned Southern blues/rock guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Tinsley Ellis is one of the most popular and hard-touring guitarists in the world, beloved for his incendiary guitar playing, gritty, soulful vocals and songwriting with emotional depth. He is a true blues/rock contemporary legend.

His 20^th album, Devil May Care is set to release on January 21, 2022 via Alligator Records, produced by Ellis and Grammy winner Kevin McKendree. With dynamic original songs that reveal true life stories, his guitar solos are elegant, compelling, packed with emotion. Ellis is highly regarded as a master of guitar tone. With 40 years on the road, he is known for not just for skills but for the way he immerses himself in his music. Ellis received two 2021 Blues Music Award nominations: ‘Blues Rock Artist of the Year’ and ‘Blues Rock Album of the Year’ for his last release, Ice Cream In Hell on Alligator Records.

Atlanta-based Tinsley Ellis has toured the world and has shared stages with Warren Haynes, Jimmy Thackery, Oliver Wood, Jonny Lang, Buddy Guy, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Gov’t Mule, Widespread Panic, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Otis Rush, Willie Dixon, Leon Russel, Son Seals, Koko Taylor and Albert Collins.

Tinsley Ellis: Very excited to see your name come up on my interview schedule. Long overdue.

Martine Ehrenclou: It definitely is. I’m thrilled to be talking with you too. How’s everything going?

Tinsley: Going good. Just on pins and needles about the tour and the album release. It’s always a challenging time to put out a blues album, but I guess we’re going to just get in the tour bus and see what happens.

Martine: You must be chomping at the bit to get back out on tour.

Tinsley: I am. And nobody’s cancelling it so far.

Martine: That’s good news. Your new album Devil May Care is so good. I really enjoyed it. The songwriting is excellent.

Tinsley: You don’t know how happy that makes me to hear you say that. Lord knows I’ve had enough time to work on it. I’ve been off the road for the first time in 40 years (because of the pandemic) for two years and I came up with 200 songs. They’re not all good, I will tell you that much. (Laughter) But I would write one and say, “This sounds like something that I would put on an album.” Then I would send it up to Alligator Records (Bruce Iglauer) and he would write back his thoughts on it. And then at a certain point, we said, “We’ve got more than enough songs that we think would make a good album. I think it’s time to start recording it.” June of last year, we started working on it and whittled down the songs to the best 50 minutes of music. That’s about all the amount of music you can put on a vinyl album with 25 minutes per side.

Martine: How did you go about whittling down 200 songs to ten?

Tinsley: I chose some of them. Alligator Records weighed in on what they liked. But also, every Wednesday I would post on Facebook what I would consider to be the best song I had made a demo of in the past week. It was called ‘Wednesday Basement Tapes.’ And then people would write and tell me what they thought about the songs, they would post about it. That was very helpful. A lot of those songs ended up on this album. A fan favorite was “Just Like Rain.” Also the opening track, “One Less Reason,” that was a fan favorite as well.

Martine: That’s cool you did that. Did you have a different goal with this album, a different feel for it than your last album Ice Cream In Hell?

Tinsley: Ice Cream In Hell, when that album came out, we really thought we had something and I think it would’ve done really well had the touring not just been nipped in the bud. We had a 60-show tour across the whole country. We did 30 of the 60 shows. We were in Northern California heading to the Pacific Northwest, halfway through the tour, and my agent called and said, “You have to come home.” I was like, “What?” It went down so fast. We came home and thought it was going to just last for a couple months. So we rescheduled the whole tour. That tour has been rescheduled three times now. Finally I said, “All right, let’s put it in a time where surely this thing will be over with.” We moved it to now when the new album is out. Now, it’s a little scary to me.

Martine: What do you mean?

Tinsley: Well, I don’t want to get sick. A lot of people are getting sick. My shows tend to be pretty crowded.

Martine: I don’t blame you. Do you have vaccine requirements for your shows?

Tinsley: We all are (vaccinated). We have protocols for safety. We decided that we’re going to tour in a bubble as much as we possibly can. But that’s not easy for a blues band to do. Most of the venues I play at have a vax requirement, but not all. So we shall see, right?

Martine: Crossing fingers. It’s a challenging time. Can you tell me about your first song on Devil May Care “One Less Reason”? It has a great groove and you play so beautifully with space between the notes.

Tinsley: I used to open up albums with songs like that. A rocking shuffle beat with a positive, tough kind of message. “I got one less reason to cry.” That one we all felt really good about as an opening song and it’s getting quite a bit of airplay on XM. I couldn’t be happier about that. That’s like the old days of FM radio if you get something on XM.

Martine: Congratulations. Well deserved. Speaking of space between the notes, in 1972 you were in the front row at a B.B. King concert and he broke a string and he handed it to you. Was B.B. King a guitar hero for you? Is that where you learned to play with space between the notes?

Tinsley: That was the B.B. King method. He sang some and then his guitar sang some, almost like answering what he just sang. I can play a lot of notes but I just prefer to let it breathe a little bit and to have that conversation back and forth between the singing and the guitar playing. B.B. King was the absolute master of that. But what sets it apart is that he had always toured with a really large band so he could take his hands off the guitar and gesture and sing, whereas I usually travel with a three or four piece band and I’ve got to play some rhythm too.

Martine: Tell me about the time B.B. King handed you the guitar string. Was that a turning point for you in your music?

Tinsley: Oh yeah, it really was. I had really gotten into blues through people like Cream and before that, of course the Rolling Stones and Mike Bloomfield. This friend of mine, his older brother came in and he goes, “I hear y’all listening to this Mike Bloomfield ‘Super Session’ album,” and he goes, “There’s a guy you got to go see, because he’s the one that they’re all getting it from.” And we said, “Well, who is it that we got to go see?” And he said, “B.B. King.”

That was a time where B.B. King was playing hotel lounges for a week at a time. Imagine going to see B.B. King every night for a week. I would do that year round.

That was the early 1970s and B.B. was booked in this hotel in north Miami Beach. I grew up in Broward County, Florida. Whoever played there for the week had to do a teen matinee show on the Saturday. They shut down the bar and it was just for teenagers to come and hear whoever the artist was. I’m sure the bands hated doing that cause they were already working them like a dog in the lounge. One Saturday afternoon, B.B. King and his band got up there and played an hour and a half set. We sat right at the front table. I could have touched his foot, I was that close. And he broke a string and my friends and I got the string and we cut it up into pieces. I’m the only one that still has their piece of the string.

After that I was the kid that would go see all the blues people. I went to see Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters many times, Albert Collins, anybody that was blues that came through Florida and Georgia, where I settled in 1975. When I got with Alligator Records in 1988, it was amazing because those same people, especially if we opened for them, they would invite me up on stage to play. I got to play with Otis Rush and Albert Collins and Koko Taylor and Buddy Guy. I got to play with my heroes. Pretty amazing, really.

Martine: What an experience. I love your song “Right Down The Drain.”

Tinsley: That’s kind of a tell-all song, you know? It sings about the party lifestyle. It’s somewhat tongue in cheek. I make my albums up in Nashville with my co-producer Kevin McKendree who plays the keyboard, at his studio. I brought the tapes back here to Atlanta and worked on them. I actually put that slide guitar part on down in my studio in my basement and added that to the song. I think the addition of slide guitar is what kind of, at least for me, pushed it over the top and gave me the idea to send it to Alligator to see whether it would be a good song for the album.

Martine: You played a beautiful slide guitar solo on it.

Tinsley: Thanks. I did that here in my basement. Probably wore my pajamas when I did it. (Laughter)

Martine: (Laughter) You spent a lot of time during the pandemic down there in your pajamas, just writing and playing?

Tinsley: I had my daytime pajamas and then I had my nighttime pajamas. (Laughter)

Martine: (Laughter) Like the rest of us during the pandemic.

Tinsley: What I usually did six days a week was go downstairs into my basement; I designated that as my songwriting time. I didn’t want to lose my guitar ability. I was so worried about being off the road for so long and losing my chops and what better way to keep the chops up than songwriting. I would come downstairs with my coffee at about seven or eight in the morning and put on some music, pull out albums I hadn’t listened to in a really long time and put something on until I’d say, “Well, it’d be kind of cool to write a song with this feel.” And then I write the song.

Martine: You were listening to some of your old favorites, Allman Brothers, Freddie King and others for inspiration during that time. On a couple of your songs, I heard hints of the Allman Brothers.

Tinsley: I live in Georgia. That’s musically the only birthright I’ve got, to play Georgia music. I would love to be a B.B. King or Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf, but it’s just not going to happen. I would feel like an imposter. But when I play that music with that Georgia sound, I just feel real comfortable doing that.

Martine: I really enjoyed your songs “Just Like Rain” and “Don’t Bury Your Love.” Gorgeous melodies.

Tinsley: “Just Like Rain” is my favorite on the album. It’s unlike any other song I’ve ever written. If it was a slow song, it would (normally) be a slow blues song like “Don’t Bury Our Love.” But “Just Like Rain” is almost something that would be from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, almost like a soul ballad, and we put the horns on it and it really gave it that kind of soul music sound. We’re playing that live. In fact, we’re playing the entire album live and I haven’t done that in over 25 years. Usually we would do like four or five songs off it, but we’re doing the album in its entirety for every show.

Of course we’ll mix in some of the songs that I’m known for over past 40 years, a lot off the live album. But mainly the focus is going to be to play these songs live and “Don’t Bury Our Love,” that’s almost like the centerpiece of our show now. Everything kind of builds up to that piece. It’s really nice in the studio but it’s even more powerful live, I think.

Martine: We’ve talked about your nationwide tour coming up. You have Tommy Castro joining you midway and you’ve got the Blues Cruise.

Tinsley: Yeah. We’re joining the Blues Cruise and I’m really happy that they’re continuing to do it in light of everything. They’ve got their protocol locked down pretty tight. Then we come back and do a few more things in the South, the Northeast, into the Midwest and then out West. It’s a 42- show tour and I’m real excited. I’m excited to play the album in its entirety live too.

For more information on Tinsley Ellis and his new album ‘Devil May Care’  see his website here. 

Listen to “One Less Reason”