Guitar Slim

Blues guitarist, Eddie Jones, more familiarly known as "Guitar Slim", was born in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood in 1926. In 1950, he teamed up with famed piano player Huey P. Smith and another player to form a blues trio. The next year he signed a contract with Imperial Records, but left them in 1953 for Specialty Records where he released "The Things I Used to Do", with the great Ray Charles on piano. The song shot to the top of the Billboard R&B chart and went on to become the best-selling R&B record of 1954. He stayed with Specialty for a few more years until the label dropped him--his subsequent recordings didn't do as well as his first--and, in 1958, he signed with Atlantic Records subsidiary Atco, but again his releases failed to live up to the success of his first hit. He developed health problems--very likely brought on by his prodigious drinking and womanizing--and in his weakened state he caught pneumonia and died on February 7, 1959, in New York City.