Kelly Joe Phelps (1959-2022) spent a full decade playing upright bass in the wild, unstructured world of free jazz before walking away to reinvent himself as an acoustic lap-style slide guitarist and singer-songwriter. This deep dive traces how a kid from the blue-collar farming town of Sumner, Washington, whose father started him on drums and piano before he ever touched a guitar at age 12, absorbed the improvisational freedom of Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, then underwent what he called his musical conversion after discovering Mississippi Fred McDowell and Robert Pete Williams.

We explore why the steel slide was the perfect tool for a former jazz improviser, how the birth of his daughter Rachel in 1990 pushed him from instrumentalist to singer-songwriter and led to his praised 1995 debut Lead Me On, and how deep listeni ...