Blues Musician. The greatest of the New Orleans Blues guitarists, famed for his 1954 hit single "The Things That I Used To Do". His gospel-tinged crooning and pioneering use of electric guitar distortion had a significant effect on the development of r&b, rock, and soul music. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2007. A child of the Mississippi Delta (born in Greenwood and raised in Hollandale), Eddie Lee Jones sang in gospel choirs as a child and was originally taught piano. In the late 1930s he started performing in local juke joints as a dancer, winning the nicknames "Limber-Legged Eddie" and "Rubber Legs" for his prowess. After serving in the Pacific with the US Army during World War II, he went to Arkansas as a singer-dancer in Willie Warren's blues band. It was Warren who first showed him how to play guitar, though his strongest influences were Robert Nighthawk, T-Bone Walker, and especially Texas axeman Gatemouth Brown, whose "Boogie Rambler" would become his theme song. In 1950 he was confident enough to head for New Orleans as a solo act, renaming himself Guitar Slim along the way. For a few years he was a featured performer (and resident) of the city's famed Dew Drop Inn, but his handful of early recordings yielded only a modest regional hit, the slow blues "Feelin' Sad" (1952). Slim's aural experiments arose simply from a beginner's desire to be heard. He played loud, keeping the control knobs of his amp all set at 10, and found that the distorted guitar overtones this produced worked for him. On occasion he would run his guitar through a PA system for an even bigger, rougher sound. This was difficult to render faithfully in a recording studio; indeed, only one producer ever managed to get it right. On October 16, 1953, the young Ray Charles arranged and produced a marathon recording session with Slim in New Orleans for the Specialty label. Four tracks emerged, two of them classics. "The Things That I Used To Do" was the first great r&b song to have a real gospel punch, intensified by Slim's raw fretwork. The equally splendid (if unheralded at the time) "The Story of My Life" (1954) was more forward-looking with its corrosive fast-picking solo breaking up the dirge-like tempo. "The Things That I Used To Do" was the best-selling r&b single of 1954, spending 14 weeks at Number One, and Slim was soon thrilling crowds from coast to coast with his incendiary live shows. No guitarist of the 1950s, not even Chuck Berry, could match Slim for flamboyance. Storming out from the wings in a bright red or green suit - with his hair dyed to match - he sang full-throttle while making the guitar a partner in his acrobatic dance moves. When the stage grew too small for his solos he would plow through the audience trailing a 300-foot guitar cord (held by an assistant), then step outside the venue and stop traffic with his playing. Regrettably, no one thought to capture his showmanship on film; a single snapshot of Slim in concert is all we have. He wasn't all flash and aggression. His heartfelt singing and sensitive, troubled lyrics led Atlantic Records (his last label) to advertise him thus: "Guitar Slim is a philosopher. His songs are exclusively concerned with the earthy truisms of life". But he never had another hit single, despite such solid efforts as "Something to Remember You By", "Sufferin' Mind", "Well I Done Got Over It", "Letter to My Girlfriend", "Quicksand", "It Hurts to Love Someone" and "If I Should Lose You". Always a hard partier, he fell into alcoholism and despair as stardom slipped away from him. His final songs, recorded in New York in 1958, were titled "When There's No Way Out" and "If I Had My Life to Live Over". On February 6, 1959, Slim collapsed backstage after finishing a gig in Newark, New Jersey; he was suffering from pneumonia but had continued to tour, and to drink heavily. Bandmates drove him to a doctor's office in Harlem, where he died before he could be transported to a hospital. Slim was reportedly 32, though he may have been a year or two older. His obituaries were overshadowed by news of the recent "Day The Music Died" and he was quietly buried near his home in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Some say he was laid to rest with his favorite guitar, a Les Paul Goldtop. Many guitarists have cited Slim as a key influence, including Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons, Chick Willis, Albert Collins, Lonnie Brooks, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Zappa recalled that listening to Guitar Slim records as a teenager in the 1950s struck him like "an ice pick in the forehead", and said his own style was closer to Slim's than to anyone else's. "The Things That I Used To Do" is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's permanent exhibit "Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll". The musician's son Rodney Armstrong is a Grammy-nominated blues guitarist who bills himself as Guitar Slim, Jr.