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The Paul Butterfield Blues Band
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band · 1965 · Track 2
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The story behind
The slide guitar riff that opens Shake Your Moneymaker doesn’t ask for permission: it crashes into the dance hall like an earthquake and doesn’t stop until everyone is moving. This isn’t the kind of blues you listen to with your eyes closed; it’s the kind that makes you forget you’re standing still and forces you to shake whatever needs shaking. Elmore James recorded it in 1961 in New Orleans, but the sound that came out of Cosimo Matassa’s studio sounds like something that was always there, as if the slide and the drums had been waiting for that moment to start talking. The lyrics, however, play with ambiguity: they repeat the phrase "shake your money maker" over and over without clarifying whether it refers to cash, hips, or both. As if money and movement were the same thing in that smoke-filled room full of amplifiers.
The version by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band on their 1965 album takes that same fire and accelerates it. Butterfield and his band — with Elvin Bishop on guitar — turned the song into a bridge between Chicago blues and the rock that was about to arrive. They weren’t trying to sound like anyone in particular; they wanted the rhythm to carry them away like a swollen river. In the studio, the group recorded live, without cuts or overdubs, and the result was a single take that captured the electricity of the moment. The album barely charted on the Billboard but, years later, ended up on lists of the greatest blues albums of all time. And though Elmore James didn’t live to see it, his song kept on living: Fleetwood Mac heard it in their early years, George Thorogood turned it into an anthem for his shows, and even Rod Stewart revived it decades later. James’ slide, that sound that seems to tear through the air, remains the signature of a song that doesn’t age because it never stopped moving.