Blues, Hot and Home Fried

By JAY COCKS

PERFORMER: ELMORE JAMES

ALBUM: ELMORE JAMES, KING OF THE SLIDE GUITAR

LABEL: CAPRICORN

THE BOTTOM LINE: These 50 historic sides are still fierce enough to fry the chip in your CD player.

THE MUSIC HISTORIES CALL THIS blues, but it sounds like hellfire and burns like brimstone.

And that means these 50 sides are some definitive blues: great blues, in the great tradition. Elmore James, who was born in Mississippi in 1918 and died in Chicago in 1963, led the archetypal bluesman's life: he rambled around the Delta with Robert Johnson in the '30s, played juke joints in the '40s, had a couple of R.-and-B.-chart hits in the early '50s, cut some fierce sides in the late '50s and early '60s (collected here in all their home-fried glory), then passed on from the accumulated effects of road life and drink before his legend started to take hold and his music was widely heard.

It was mostly the reverence and enthusiasm of white musicians -- notably the Allman Brothers -- that broke James through to the big audience that had escaped him most of his life. Now, with a little of the luck that is long past due him, this superb set should place him in the pantheon where he belongs. If it does, that fits in neatly with the scenario too. It was the unexpected commercial success of Columbia's wondrous boxed collection of Robert Johnson that sent other companies back to their vaults, breathing a little life into history. So Johnson and James ramble together again.

James played a modernized, slightly souped-up version of Johnson's Delta slide-guitar style and sang with a five-alarm urgency that defied dampening. "The crying guitar and the screaming voice" are what Bobby Robinson called it, but that was only the foundation of James' style, which, as amply represented here, shows plenty of range. Only the intensity never varies. Talk to Me Baby has a rock overlay; Bobby's Rock spins along with blues underpinnings driving a twangy, near countrified, Duane Eddy-style beat; I Believe makes you hear the grit under the guitar strings, the true Delta way; Anna Lee and Strange Angel feature James with a band, big-city style but still cutting close to the soul and staying close to his roots.

Audio purists may grouse that the CD quality makes these sounds ring clear, instead of down and dirty. That is a little like a car collector griping that some fine detailing on the chrome spoils the lines. Spruced up though they are, these songs sound nasty and urgent as ever. The quality is so direct and uncluttered that it can take you straight back to the days that drummer Sam Myers recalls in the album notes, when he, James and the band would pile into a nine-passenger station wagon with their instruments and head on down the road. You couldn't miss 'em: that black-and-white wagon had a yellow broom painted on the side and a big sign that read THE BROOMDUSTERS, after an early James hit, Dust My Broom. That broom still sweeps clean.