India, June 14 -- It is a night sometime in the mid-1960s, Greenwich Village, New York City. The air in the Cafe Au Go Go on Bleecker Street carries the residue of spilled beer, cigarette smoke and the rebellious zeitgeist of that era. A young woman with a battered acoustic guitar finishes her set. Across the room, a slight figure with an Afro and a guitar that seems to grow from his shoulder watches with the intensity of a hawk. He approaches, pulls up a barstool, and plays along with her. This is not yet Jimi Hendrix. He is still Jimmy James, playing small rooms with his band, the Blue Flames. But he has found something in this woman's music that compels him - that rare, undefinable quality that makes one musician recognise another not merely as a peer but as a co-conspirator. Ellen McIlwaine, red-headed, Nashville-born and Japan-raised, plays the slide guitar like she is squeezing something precious from the instrument, and she sings with a voice that shifts the way fickle weather shifts - sudden, but unstoppable. That night in the Village is like a microcosm of Ellen McIlwaine's entire life story: she was the one the great ones came to, and yet the world never quite came to her. Born in Nashville in 1945 but raised as the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary in Japan, which gave her something few American musicians possessed: an ear shaped by genuinely foreign music, by US Armed Forces radio and hymns in a country where the blues had not yet been. Later, when she absorbed everything else - the Delta, Chicago, rock and roll - they arrived as one more exotic experience among many. It made her syncretic before she had a word for it. It is why, later in her career, she could scat in Japanese syllables over a slide guitar groove without it sounding like a stunt. The idioms had always been equally hers, equally adopted and transformed. She landed a six-month residency at the Cafe Au Go Go for a dollar fifty a night. She opened for Odetta, Richie Havens, Mississippi John Hurt - the reigning gods of the Village scene. And somewhere along the way, as word of her talent spread, the music industry came calling with its verdict: put down the guitar, they told her. Just sing. Be a pop singer. Leave the slide to the men. Ponder that for a moment. Here was a musician whom Jimi Hendrix had sought out across a crowded room, whose slide technique left fellow guitarists quietly slipping out of the back doors of clubs, whose voice spanned four octaves and bent genres at will - and the industry's considered response was to ask her to become decorative. To reduce herself to a microphone stand. The guitar, apparently, was not hers to claim. She did not comply. What she did was play. On slide guitar, she was ferocious in a way that had no precedent in a woman, and few precedents in anyone. Taj Mahal, who would go on to become one of the great blues guitarists of his generation, remembered watching guitarists creep out of clubs when she played because they "just couldn't take the heat". Record stores filed her under "folk" because she played acoustic guitar, failing entirely to register the electric fury she could unleash. Radio programmers could not categorise her, because she moved between acoustic blues and psychedelic rock and gospel and Latin rhythms and those Japanese melodic inflections without staying still long enough to be boxed. This breadth, in a man, would have been called genius. As a woman, it made her difficult to market. She moved to Canada in the 1980s, eventually settling in Montreal, where she continued to record and perform for devoted followers. In her later years, she drove a school bus to make ends meet - the Goddess of Slide, steering children through suburban streets while most of the world remained oblivious to what those hands had once done. She deserved arenas. She got a school bus. Start with We the People. Then play Higher Ground. Then segue to Can't Find My Way Home. Then, if you have any justice in you, find the rest....