Guitar Slim

GUITAR SLIMLong Cord, Loud SuitHe rode into the club on another man’s shoulders, dressed in a suit the color of a fire truck, his hair dyed to match - and he was still playing guitar.Eddie 'Guitar Slim' Jones didn’t just perform the blues. He staged it. A three-hundred-foot guitar cord let him leave the building mid-solo, walk out onto the street still playing, and saunter back in to find the crowd exactly where he’d left it. He turned his amplifier up until it screamed - on purpose, a decade before anyone agreed that was a good idea - and in October 1953, in a cramped New Orleans studio with a young, broke, moonlighting pianist named Ray Charles calling the shots, he cut 'The Things That I Used to Do.' It sold a million copies. It topped the R&B chart for six weeks. And it quietly rewired what the electric guitar was allowed to sound like.Jimi Hendrix covered him. Buddy Guy says he’s the reason he picked up a guitar at all. Frank Zappa called his sound a 'smuttiest' he’d ever heard - and meant it as the highest praise he had. And then, four days after Buddy Holly’s plane went down, Guitar Slim died in a New York hotel room at thirty-two, leaving behind no surviving film of a single performance - just a scattering of photographs and the astonished testimony of everyone who ever saw him play.This book follows him from a Mississippi cotton field to the Apollo Theatre, through the suits, the Cadillacs, the gospel-trained voice, and the guitar tone that got there first - before rock and roll had a name for what it was borrowing. It’s a short, loud life, and it deserves a book that doesn’t waste a word of it.For blues fans who already know the name, and for anyone about to hear 'The Things That I Used to Do' for the first time.