Cover photo © 2025 Bob Kieser

While he may not be a household name, guitarist Jonathan Ellison has been playing music literally all of his life. He grew up in the gospel world, making music with his family’s band before venturing into the sights and sounds of the Memphis music community. After years of hard work, he attained a level of recognition that few artists have achieved.

“Preston Shannon was my mentor, like a second father to me. He was a true blues man. I played behind him for a number of years. He was a fine singer, guitarist, and songwriter who worked in the Beale Street clubs for several decades, eventually being referred to as “the King of Beale Street”. Since I was going out there performing and playing with him, they started calling me “the Prince of Beale Street”.

“In September of 2017, Preston asked me if I would front his band at the club until spring rolled around. He was battling cancer, and was constantly cold. He’d have a heater going on stage in the summer months. I’d do anything for Preston Shannon, so I fronted his band in hopes of him coming back, at which point I’d go back to doing what I was doing. But Preston subsequently passed away in January, 2018. I continued to lead his band for a couple of years after that.

“The host at B.B. King’s Blues Club at that time was Frank “Scrap Iron” Robinson Jr., who was on many of the Legendary Rhythm & Blues cruises in addition to being the road manager for Little Milton Campbell, and a well-known ambassador of the Blues for the states of Mississippi and Tennessee. Scrap Iron came to me and said, “They call you the Prince of Beale Street. The king is dead. What happens when the king dies? The prince becomes king!” And he spoke with Tommy Peters, who was the president and CEO of the Beale Street Blues Company, whose holdings included B.B. King’s Blues Club in Memphis. God rest their souls, both of them passed on. Scrap Iron talked to Tommy, saying, “Look, I want to crown Jonathan Ellison the new King of Beale Street.”

“Tommy said, “I agree, he deserves to be the king.” So they did a coronation service at the club, where I was officially crowned, but instead of a crown, I received a wrestling belt because Memphis is all about wrestling! I received proclamations from the city of Memphis and the state of Tennessee from the governor with his official seal. I was very honored and humbled, realizing that I’m now standing in big shoes here.”

Ellison started his career at the age of four years old, when his oldest brother, Ira, left the family band to do other things.

“I’m the youngest of eight children and my mother and father had a gospel group with my siblings, the Ellison Family Gospel Group. Our dad taught all of us how to play instruments, how to sing in harmony. When Ira left I was thrust into the gospel group as the drummer. He since passed away, killed in a car accident back in 2001. We were the only two left-hand people in the family. So my dad realized that I was left-handed and he decided to put me on the drums. I played drums pretty much up until the age of ten, but around age seven, that’s when I started fiddling around with my dad’s guitar.

“He would show me little chords, little two string blues licks. I just had a passion for guitar but ended up playing bass before crossing over to guitar, which I did full time around the age of 12. I had been playing pretty good, but I wasn’t needed in that capacity for the family group. I was the utility person who could play everything if necessary.

“We traveled around the south quite a bit, all through Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, and did quite a few programs in Illinois and up in Michigan. We recorded four full albums and three 45 RPM singles. All of them stand out to me. The very first album that my family did was a live album in Brownsville, Tennessee at our home church at the time, Browns Creek Baptist Church. And during that time, around 1976, my mother was pregnant with me when they recorded that album. That’s always been my favorite one to listen to, the album that’s entitled Roots of My Soul.

“My dad is a phenomenal guitar player. The way that he incorporated the blues into gospel music was truly amazing. We didn’t know it at the time. It wasn’t until I started really doing a deep dive into the Blues that I realized that my daddy really was a blues player. But he just was devoted to church. He was a deacon and now he’s an elder at 83 years old, still kicking.

“His approach to gospel music was more of a bluesy way. The title track on the Roots of My Soul album is a song he wrote that’s a slow 12 bar blues. It’s a beautiful song. And on Jesus’ Paycheck, which is the last album our family did together, there’s a song on there called “Thanking the Lord” that if you listen real closely to, it sounds just like the Z.Z. Hill classic “Down Home Blues,” so it has a real familiarity to it. That album came out in 1985, I believe.

Eventually Ellison and his siblings grew up, started getting married, and some of them moved out of state, and their gospel band slowly fizzled away.

“We still get together every year at our family home in Brownsville. We’ll pull out the guitars, sit there and play all the Ellison family stuff. Our dad essentially retired, having been a radio disc jockey for 37 years, playing gospel music on FM radio. He started when gospel wasn’t popular on FM radio, turning what started out as a one hour radio show on Sundays into a seven day a week radio broadcast every evening from 6:00 PM to midnight at the local radio station here in Brownsville, Tennessee. Every year they would put on an appreciation service. The last 10 years of those appreciations, we would come together and do an impromptu as the Ellison family, force Daddy to get up and sing with us.

“It’s really cool because my brothers and I haven’t played this music regularly in 30, 35 years. We get together early that Saturday morning for about an hour to knock the rust off. That night we get up there like we’ve been playing it all the time. It’s crazy to witness how quickly my brother Marvin just locks in on bass and brother Vince on rhythm guitar. My brother Robert is playing lead guitar. I’m the one that is standing in for Daddy, singing all of the Ellison family songs that he led, and playing guitar. To be up there and watch Daddy looking at us, playing his music, and me trying to sound the most like him on guitar and vocally, seeing the tears roll down his face. He gave me a compliment not too long ago. He said, “Out of all of my boys, you are the only one that sounds just like me.” I cherish that because my Dad’s a great player.”

The guitar player ended up going to college at the University of Memphis. In his spare time, he started exploring the local gospel scene, playing with some different choirs and ensembles.

“At that point, I didn’t think that I would have the opportunity to play music as a livelihood. It was more or less a hobby. I started working in the corporate sector and had a really good career going as a safety manager for an airline. But the desire of wanting to play was always there, and I didn’t want to have regret, looking back in my later years and saying, what if?

“I took a leap of faith and started chasing my dream. In short order, I started performing as a substitute guitar player at the BB King’s Blues Club on Beale Street in Memphis. From that I went from being a substitute, just relieving the main guitar player when he was going out of town, to ultimately becoming part of the band, and then later the first band leader and primary vocalist of the B.B. King All Star Band. And the rest, I guess you could say is history.

“That all started in around 2001, working my way through the ranks, going out to play other clubs on Beale Street, as well as around the city, because Memphis is a melting pot, a bustling area of great musicians, great singers, great entertainers, and quite a few clubs to hone in on your craft. I went from subbing to playing seven days a week.”

Like many before him such as Sam Cooke or Johnny Taylor, Ellison found that some people in the gospel community did not appreciate his move to play the “devil’s music”.

“One night I was on stage at B.B. King’s Blues Club. We’re getting ready to take our first break. The music stops and I set my guitar down on the stand. I had my back to the audience, so all I heard was, “Hey, isn’t Ivory Ellison your dad? I turned around and saw somebody from Brownsville. They recognized me, and they had a look on their face, like they really wanted to ridicule me for being on the stage of a blues club. I just smiled and said, “Yes, that’s my father. And what are you doing here? That took him back a bit.

“My dad wasn’t happy about it initially because he wanted me to stay in gospel. But the thing about gospel is you’re doing it strictly for love. You’re not going to get paid much. For me, I always look at music, no matter what genre I’m playing, as ministry. If you come to any of my shows, you’re going to hear about the presence of God and my savior, Lord Jesus Christ, throughout my show, I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for him.

“If there’s somebody out there that’s not a believer, I want to make sure I don’t offend you, but I need to share with you that just because I’m playing the blues, that does not affect my salvation. I look at the blues as upliftment. You get a chance to hear music, songs telling stories about similar things you may be going through, and you get an opportunity to understand that you’re not by yourself. So when I’m on stage, it’s ministry, and my definition of ministry is when you can affect the hearts and minds of people in a positive way, then you’re ministering to them.

“Over time, my dad really came around to it. When I was crowned the King of Beale Street back in 2019, he came to the B.B. King’s Blues Club, the first time he had ever heard me play secular music live. Since then he has been to several of my shows and become one of my biggest supporters. My only regret is that my mother, Ella Wee Ellison, never got a chance to see me perform secular music live. She passed away in 2012, but she was my number one fan. She was also a faithful wife that was going to honor her husband’s wishes, and my dad at the time didn’t necessarily approve of me playing the music. It seems like after my mother passed, a piece of her spirit just reached inside of him, and he became very supportive of what I was doing.”

In 1998, Ellison started doing some session work for the legendary singer Denise LaSalle, who had hits with “Trapped By A Thing Called Love,” “A Man Sized Job,” and “Married, But Not To Each Other.” In 2009, LaSalle tapped Ellison to be her guitar player, a position he held until she passed away in 2018.

“Denise took me around the world. We toured, hit many, many countries. She was my producer, producing my first single, a cover rendition of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”. She also was helping me with the Guitar Cry for Me album up until she got sick. She was like a mother to me and I learned so much about the business from her. When my mom passed away, I’ll never forget this. Denise grabbed my face, she was a tiny woman, you know, she stood about about five foot one. She reached up and grabbed my cheeks, put her hands on my face, and said, “You still got a mother here!” I’ll be forever grateful to her for all of the things that she taught me, for the opportunity to play on some of the biggest stages around the world. She was an amazing woman.”

LaSalle didn’t just give Ellison a job. She taught him several important life lessons, especially one that still rings as true today as the day she educated her young guitar player.

“I had just started playing in the band with her and we were doing a festival in Beaumont Texas. Denise didn’t mind what position she was at on the bill. She was a headlining act, but she really didn’t like the headline slot because she wanted the opportunity to be out at her merchandise table, to talk to her fans, taking pictures, telling stories, and signing autographs, and quite obviously, selling some merchandise. Denise was not going to leave until the last fan was gone.

“This particular weekend we had done two days in a row where we were traveling, do the show, stay at the arena all night waiting on Miss D, get back to the hotel to get a couple hours sleep, jump back on the van or the bus and ride another seven, eight hours to the next next place. The band pretty much spent, and Ms. D yet again is inside of the arena. So the band, knowing that I’m a greenhorn, decided to gas me up to go get Ms. D to leave.

“When I walk in, she has a line of people at the merchandise table. I’m standing back where she could see me, just trying to let her know I was there. At one point, she looked up and asked, “Hey baby, you need something? And I said, “No, ma’am, I’m just standing here waiting to see if you need me to help you bring anything back to the van. And she said, “Well, you go back to the van and I’ll call you if I need you”. So, so I go back to the van, 20 minutes go by and her driver tells me that she wants to talk to me inside. She said, grab this toe. So I grabbed the tote. Then she said, let’s put that tote on top of that. So I’ve got two totes, and they’re heavy. As we’re walking, she said, “Jonathan, I know you’re young, but I need you to understand something in this business, it’s about the two P’s.

“And those P’s are people and product. If you don’t take care of the people, they won’t buy your product. The only reason you have a job here is because of these people. They came out to hear us perform, and I’m going to give them my undivided attention. So I need you to understand that you should never, ever come out here and try to rush me away from the people ever again. One day you are going to have a chance, and you need to remember about the people and the product. These people have spent their hard earned money to have this experience. If we want to continue being able to do this thing that we love, we have to share that love back to them.

“A lot of the younger artists out here right now are missing that mark. They weren’t blessed to have the opportunity to spend time Bobby Rush, to be able to spend time with Latimore, Theodis Ealey, and Otis Clay, to know them on a personal level, to speak about life, to have the opportunity to sit down and talk with B.B. King or Mr. Bobby Blue Bland, Bobby Womack. That’s what my time with Denise LaSalle was able to do for me.”

Ellison released his Guitar Cry for Me album in 2017. LaSalle was recovering from open heart surgery. Ellison decided to take on the reins of trying to push the album out there and self-promote it.

“I think that album is a diamond in the rough. I am getting the new album ready to come out, which is going to be called The Rhythm And Soul Blues Man. I hope it will be a conduit for people to do a dive into my catalog, hearing some of the music that I’ve already done and, bringing me more to the forefront. You always hope that people will recognize the work and the time that I’ve put in establishing myself and help me get to the next level.”

In 2023, Ellison was part of a project called The Silent Partners, with Russell Jackson on bass and Tony “T.C.” Coleman on drums. Both of them had played in B.B. King’s band. Their album, Changing Times, was nominated for a 2023 Blues Blast Music Award in the Contemporary Blues Album category, and the band also was nominated for the Sean Costello Rising Star Award.

“I’ve known Tony Coleman for a number of years through the B.B. King’s Blues Club, which Tony was an integral part of as well as all the years that he played drums behind B.B. King. I knew of Russell Jackson, a great bass player, two phenomenal guys. They reached out to me and asked, would I be interested in being a part of this trio? I was honored, man, when you got two legends like TC and Russell asking little old me from Brownsville, Tennessee, to be a part of a blockbuster trio. I was amped for the opportunity and learned a whole lot. Tony and Russell are doing some other things. But hopefully one day soon we’ll all come back together and do some more Silent Partners shows and projects.

In the end, Ellison is hopeful about the future of his career, and the world we live in. His beliefs keep him grounded through the twists and turns of life.

“I’m a man that loves God. I’m a man that’s devoted to family, and also a musician who is devoted to great music. The industry is constantly evolving, so you better start changing with the times and understand the climate. As independent artists, we have the opportunity to do some extraordinary things. It just takes a lot more sweat equity. Your passion and, and drive have to be paramount at this point. It’s constant work. And from that constant work comes the joy of putting out good product. I think it’s a good time for independent artists to continue to move, grow, and for me to build a grassroots fan base for the Jonathan Ellison Band. My shows are about what comes from my heart, reaching out to your heart. I play with passion and I would love to have as many people as as possible to check out my music. I’m enjoying the journey. I’ll be searching until the day I die!”