In the prime of her career, vocalist and slide guitarist Ellen McIlwaine had Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits open for her, and was friends with luminaries of rock and roll like Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, and Eddie Kramer.

But all of that came crashing down, after she was blacklisted from the big music labels—tossed out by the heavyweights of the 1970s recording industry for not acquiescing to making music not her own.

Although she would go on to record other albums with smaller labels, even forming her own at one point, McIlwaine faded from the collective memory of music lovers and eventually became a school bus driver in Calgary.

Her story, an incredible life that has largely been lost to history, is playing at the Calgary International Film Festival this September in director Alfonso Maiorana’s Goddess of Slide: The Forgotten Story of Ellen McIlwaine.

“It’s about a female slide guitar player, singer, who was a trailblazer and who influenced many men and women—both with her voice and her guitar playing—and who was who fought for a place in music history,” said Maiorana.

“She fought for justice, fought for acknowledgment, and fought for the right to play guitar the way anyone would want to play in a male-dominated industry.

The genesis of the film came from McIlwaine contacting Maiorana after seeing his 2017 documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World, which won multiple awards including a World Cinema Special Documentary Award at Sundance, a Top 10 listing at the Toronto International Film Festival, and three Canadian Screen Awards.

It also played at the Calgary International Film Festival in 2018.

“She had reached out to me and with a lovely letter saying, ‘oh, it’s about freaking time someone makes a movie about Indigenous contribution to music’ and all that. We went back and forth and, and then I realized that she was Ellen McIlwaine, because in 2014 while I was filming Rumble in New Orleans, the Neville Brothers told me, ‘hey, you need to go buy this guitar album,'” said Maiorana.

“There’s a compilation album out there with all the greatest guitar players in rock history of the 70s, and that next day, and I bought one of the albums because the one that had Link Wray on it, because that’s what I was doing. Then I read Eric Clapton, Rory Gallagher, and I see Ellen McIlwaine, and I was like, ‘wait, where did I hear that name?'”

Maiorana said that her story, one of having to navigate a male-dominated industry in the 1970s, while still trying to maintain her artistic integrity was a compelling one.

So much so that he worked with McIlwaine on a very personal level, getting access to her diaries and working with her on a plan as part of the documentary.

That plan was to have her re-record some of her old songs, and then produce an original with the goal of not only reconnecting her with the wider music community and to put the spotlight back on her legacy in the same way The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile did for the legendary outlaw country musician.

Brian Owens, the Artistic Director for CIFF said back in August, said that he was very excited to announce that Goddess of Slide: The Forgotten Story of Ellen McIlwaine would be presented at the festival.

“She actually lived the last 20 years or so of her life here in Calgary. But back in the 60s, she played with the likes of Hendrix and Dylan, had her own record deal, and became huge in Australia before the playing clubs here, towards the end of her life,” he said.

“It’s a high-quality film that we’re excited to have a world premiere for.”

The opening sequence for the film can be viewed on Vimeo at vimeo.com/937775774/158dc68851.

“She wasn’t bitter, but she was ready to tell the deeper part.”

Alfonso Maiorana, Director of Goddess of Slide: The Forgotten Story of Ellen McIlwaine

No one like McIlwaine

Sadly, McIlwaine died of esophageal cancer in 2021 before that could come to pass.

“Tragically, she passed, and then it was very difficult for me to turn it around because I didn’t know—I’m just a messenger, you know. Months and months later, when I started again to film the movie and continue, I received a package in the mail and it was her ashes. I was like, ‘Wow, OK.’ She wanted her ashes to be spread in three specific places,” Maiorana said.

Maiorana said that he was able to fulfill her wishes, with two of those moments as part of the documentary.

The hope, he said, was although McIlwaine never got that comeback, that audiences would connect with her story.

That story of being adopted by missionaries, being raised in Japan, and even throughout her career working to try and please them.

“When Ellen was at Woodstock, for instance, her first manager was a 75-year-old woman who had never been a manager. She just wanted somebody to take care of her, to protect her. So, she thought, well, they look like my parents,” Maiorana said.

“Ellen was the talk of the town. She became Ellen’s manager, and now you have this 75-year-old woman who has no managerial experience except managing her farm going up against these big-shot music people. You can tell that Ellen was looking for that, searching for someone that reminded that maybe we were like her parents.”

Other stories, like how Polydor tried to force her to record a jazz-rock album, to trying to get some of the people she thought were friends—some of the biggest names in music at the time—to defend her art, and watching them turn their backs.

“She had a three-record on Polydor, and they basically tore up the contract and said you’re not going to play your guitar, you’re not going to play piano, you’re not going to play harmonica. We’re going to write all the music, all the words, and we’re going to hire the band, which essentially, at that time, was going to be an all-white kind of jazz-rock band. And of course, she said no,” Maiorana said.

She eventually, in the depths of drinking, agreed to record that album after a minor comeback performance in New York.

“Everybody goes wow… and ‘oh, she’s back, where have you been?’ She struggled with it. She did it, and it was horrible because the album was not good. The record DJs started to not play her music anymore. The critics, of course, were like, This is not the Ellen McIlwaine we know, and that was it. That was a big turning point in her life.”

Eventually, she moved to Calgary and left music behind entirely.

“She wasn’t bitter, but she was ready to tell the deeper part.”

“I truly hope that that there is an audience, because even today, what Ellen was doing then, there’s nobody that plays like her. Taj Mahal just told me recently, there’s no way that that Bonnie Raitt can sing better than Ellen McIlwaine. The same with the guitar… what Ellen does on the guitar? I mean, there’s no there’s no comparison. Eddie Kramer, who’s the sound engineer for Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, all these people, ‘no one can play guitar like Ellen.'”

Goddess of Slide: The Forgotten Story of Ellen McIlwaine is playing at the Calgary International Film Festival on Sept. 20 at The Plaza, and on Sept. 25 at The Globe.

The film was directed by Alfonso Maiorana, and produced by Alfonso Maiorana and Agata De Santis.

To purchase tickets, see ciff2024.eventive.org/films/66a2b8b75d933a004fb76190.