1959 – 2022
The much-loved multi-instrumentalist and master of slide guitar has died at his home in Iowa at the age of 62
On 31 May, Kelly Joe Phelps’ friend and collaborator Steve Dawson announced the passing of the blues guitarist via an appropriately low-key message on social media. A close friend of Phelps, Dawson understood the modesty of his character and his music, which was rich with emotion and skill: “His ideas flowed out of him so fluently it was mind-boggling,” he said.
Although known predominantly for his outstanding lap and slide guitar playing, Phelps’ musical journey started with an immersion into free jazz techniques primarily through the bass guitar, looking to musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane for inspiration. He moved onto guitar through players like Robert Johnson, but his relationship with the slide began later, at around the age of 30, with Mississippi Fred McDowell the main
influence: “There was something about his playing that touched me in a very deep place,” Phelps said. “I still don’t understand what that place is, necessarily. The sound of the slide guitar opened up for me…”
Phelps released albums between 1994 and 2012, with his debut, Lead Me On, a sparsely produced blend of original tunes, and gospel and pre-war blues performed on fingerpicked and slide guitar, signalling the landing of a significant talent. Around this time and for his second album, Roll Away The Stone, he was primarily using a Gibson FJN (Folk Jumbo Natural) guitar on his lap, a model Gibson designed with a wider fingerboard for both steel and nylon strings, but one Phelps decided was well suited for lap playing. Although he apparently always had a pretty decent collection of instruments lined up, a couple of choice highlights are a National Style 0, a Gibson J-60 (which he converted for lap playing after accidentally putting his fist through the FJN) and a Martin HD-28.
Phelps was a hugely talented and diverse musician, adept at bass guitar, double bass and banjo alongside his versions of six-string guitar, but he was also one who struggled with artistic satisfaction among other things. He felt at times, and more keenly towards the latter end of his career, that the limitations of the lap slide were becoming more apparent and switched to bottleneck guitar accompanying his fingerstyle playing, a style he found broader and more rewarding: “It is very freeing to be able to fret things,” he once explained. “To change chord voicings or fret notes behind the slide while holding the slide on the strings… Another thing I like about
