Guitar Slim

Slim sold the act as hard as the song. He dyed his hair to match his bright suits, and accounts put his guitar cord at 200 to 350 feet, long enough to carry the show out the door and into the street, sometimes on his valet's shoulders. He played loud and distorted, a decade before rock guitarists did. At the 1953 New Orleans session for The Things That I Used to Do, a young Ray Charles arranged and produced; the record held number one on the R&B chart for six weeks and sold over a million copies.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bryant's Grocery — 6.7 mi
  The ruin of the Money store where Emmett Till was accused in August 1955, on private land beside the railroad, with a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at the corner.
• Carroll County Courthouse — 19 mi
  The courthouse in Carrollton where, on 17 March 1886, armed white men fired into a courtroom and killed about two dozen Black people, and no one was ever charged.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 21 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 25 mi
  A museum built around the brick cotton gin in Indianola where B.B. King worked in the 1940s, with his grave in a memorial garden on the grounds.

More markers nearby

• Robert Johnson Gravesite — 1.3 mi
• Bobbie Gentry — 2.9 mi
• Hubert Sumlin — 3.4 mi
• Greenwood — 4.0 mi