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When filmmaker Alfonso Maiorana first set out to make a documentary about musician Ellen McIlwaine, he was planning a globe-trotting affair that would have had the “Goddess of slide” accompany him to various places that were central to her life.

Things didn’t go as planned. Maiorana had befriended McIlwaine a few years before beginning production and had finally convinced the reluctant musician to do the documentary. The award-winning filmmaker began shooting in February 2021 in Calgary, where McIlwaine lived since the early 1990s. The idea was to shoot interviews with her at the beginning of production and the end. In between, she would travel with him to Woodstock, New Orleans, Japan, Australia, Nashville, Toronto and Montreal among other spots.

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But just months after production began, McIlwaine was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She spent her final days in a Calgary hospice and died on June 23, 2021, at the age of 75.

It was difficult to continue at that point, but Maiorana did his best to stick to the plan. He took McIlwaine’s ashes with him as he travelled to various cities collecting interviews, chronicling her remarkable journey as an influential artist whose talents were often under-appreciated.

“Those ashes, I carried them with me everywhere I went,” Maiorana says. “From Japan to Australia to New Orleans, Montreal. Wherever I went, I had her with me. It was always interesting going through customs. I would have her death certificate with me and permission to travel with her ashes across the world. I kept her until the film was edited.”

The resulting documentary, Goddess of Slide: The Forgotten Story of Ellen McIlwaine, will screen at the Calgary International Film Festival on Friday, Sept. 20. The star-studded film is a reverent and often heart-breaking account of the musician’s life, exploring the career highs and lows of an uncompromising talent whose gifts as a songwriter, singer and stunning slide-guitarist were never matched by commercial success and recognition. It’s a beautiful film, but it doesn’t take long into a conversation with Maiorana to sense the regret he feels that the documentary didn’t achieve all of the goals he set for it. He initially saw it as an opportunity not only to celebrate an extraordinary life but also to revive McIlwaine’s career, not unlike how Malik Bendjelloul’s 2012 film Searching for Sugarman gave a late-in-life boost to singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez.

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A comeback certainly wasn’t out of the question. Not long before McIlwaine discovered she had cancer, she was the subject of a glowing 2021 profile in the renowned British music magazine Mojo. Maiorana initially wanted her to record music in Nashville as part of the documentary. He even had an ambitious plan for the artist to play at Carnegie Hall, where McIlwaine had wowed audiences in 1972 with a performance of her song We The People.

“I was going to do this whole thing where Taj Mahal, Tom Waits and Ruthie Foster, who was a friend of Ellen’s, would surprise her when she is playing and do this whole scene at the end of the film with all her friends (but) she is goddess, she is the one,” Maiorana says. “That fell through.”

Perhaps one of the most tragic aspects of the timing of McIlwaine’s death is that she did not get to hear the impact she had on the artists who speak in the film. Goddess of Slide features Taj Majal, Ani DiFranco, former Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, blues singer Amanda Marshall, Michael Jackson and Jeff Beck guitarist Jennifer Batten and Canadian expat musician and producer Colin Linden, among others. Some knew her, some were just fans. All sing her praises.

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Born in Tennessee, McIlwaine moved to Japan at the age of two with her adoptive missionary parents and attended an international school in Kobe. It made for an unusually multicultural upbringing, particularly for someone growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. It also introduced her to a wide variety of international music while she soaked up Ray Charles, Fats Domino and Professor Longhair tracks she heard on Japanese radio.

She moved to Greenwich Village in 1966 and began finding her own groove. While there, she began opening for blues and folk greats, warming stages for Odetta, Richie Havens, Buddy Guy and Mississippi John Hurt. She began a residency at New York’s Cafe Au Go Go that paid her $1.50 per night. For six months, she played two sets a night for six days a week. It was during that time she was introduced to a young artist named Jimi Hendrix. They became friends and performed together over six nights. It was an auspicious start to what many believe should have been a quick and surefire journey to stardom.

Within a few years, she had moved to Woodstock and formed the psychedelic blues outfit Fear Itself, releasing one album with the band before embarking on a solo career that produced two acclaimed records for Polydor. In 1974, her label released The Guitar Album, a compilation that features a who’s who of axemen who were on the label at the time. That included Link Wray, Eric Clapton, Roy Buchanan, Rory Gallagher and T-Bone Walker. McIlwaine was the only female guitarist on the album.

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That record was Maiorana’s introduction to McIlwaine. It began when the filmmaker was co-writing and co-directing 2017’s Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World, a Canadian Screen Award-winning documentary that explored the role Indigenous musicians played in shaping popular music. Among those featured were the Neville Brothers. Drummer Cyril Neville recommended Maiorana check out The Guitar Album. The filmmaker was floored by McIlwaine’s recording of We the People, the live-at-Carnegie-Hall track featured on the record. Then something strange happened. After Rumble was released, Maiorana received a congratulatory email from somebody named Ellen in Calgary. Initially, he didn’t put two and two together. They began corresponding and eventually, McIlwaine told him that she used to “dabble” in slide guitar and had played with Hendrix. Suddenly, Maiorana realized who had been emailing him.

“It pops in my head: Oh my god, is that Ellen McIlwaine from the Guitar Album?!” he says. “I emailed her and said ‘Sorry, but are you Ellen McIlwaine from the Guitar Album?’ She said ‘Yes, that’s me.’ I answered ‘Can I call you?’”

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While Goddess of Slide certainly chronicles those heady early years, it also spends a good deal of time pondering why McIlwaine’s story has been “forgotten.” It follows a frustrating career throughout the ’80s, ’90s and into the 2000s. She continued playing and releasing dynamic music, but by all accounts never reached the levels she should have in the industry. So how did she end up spending a quarter-of-a-century living a relatively quiet life in the Bankview neighbourhood of Calgary, where she drove a school bus for an all-girls charter school? There’s no easy answer. Sexism in the industry, a lack of proper management and unsupportive record labels are identified as culprits, but McIlwaine is also depicted as an artist who wasn’t willing to compromise.

While she may have been reluctant at first to be the subject of a documentary, she eventually took pains to ensure the story was accurate even after she became ill. She was good friends with Maiorana by that point, even calling to comfort him when his mother died during the pandemic. McIlwaine told a friend that she was initially reluctant to tell the filmmaker about her illness, fearing he may lose support for the project if it was discovered she was dying. It was only after she passed away that Maiorana discovered a box of journals during a trip to Calgary which McIlwaine had written as part of a planned autobiography that was never finished. Snippets from those journals appear in the film and are read by Amanda Marshall.  

“She had put tabs on some of the pages and she would write ‘Alfonso’ and put a little arrow pointing to a paragraph,” Maiorana, says. “She had started doing this knowing that she was going to die. She was preparing, helping.”

Goddess of Slide: The Forgotten Story of Ellen McIlwaine screens Friday, Sept. 20 at 6 p.m. at the Plaza and Wednesday, Sept. 25 at 9 p.m. at the Globe Cinema as part of the Calgary International Film Festival.

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