Carolina Slim born 22 August 1923

Carolina Slim (August 22, 1923 – October 22, 1953) was an American Piedmont blues guitarist and singer. His best-known records are "Black Cat Trail" and "I'll Never Walk in Your Door". He used various pseudonyms during his brief recording career, including Country Paul, Jammin' Jim, Lazy Slim Jim and Paul Howard. He recorded 27 songs. Details of his life outside of his music career are scant, and the reasons for the use of different names are unclear. 

Carolina Slim was born with the relatively undistinguished name of Edward P. Harris in Leasburg, North Carolina. He grew up amid the field and forest workers whose lives, exploits, and deaths have become such an integral part of his music. His father taught him to play the guitar and passed down to Slim hundreds of songs accumulated in a lifetime which began before the Civil War. 

Carolina Slim grew up to be a veritable giant of a man, standing over six and a half feet tall. As a young man, his giant strides took him into the most remote corners of every state in the South and Southwest. Influenced by Lightnin’ Hopkins and Blind Boy Fuller, he brought new songs, new stories, new joy to the cotton fields of Georgia and the Carolinas; to the bottomlands of the Mississippi Delta; to the rowdy, rollicking, turpentine camps in the Piney Woods of Texas and Arkansas. While the folk music of America is as variegated, big-hearted and broad-shouldered as the country itself, none of the music has more soul, more honesty, more ability to reach directly to the heart of human feeling and experience than the songs of the fields and work camps of the deep South where Carolina Slim roamed. 

                                     

In 1950, he relocated to Newark, New Jersey, and made his recording debut for Savoy Records, billed as Carolina Slim. His first single was "Black Chariot Blues" backed with "Mama's Boogie", recorded on July 24, 1950, and released by Acorn Records (Acorn 3015), a subsidiary of Savoy. In 1951 and 1952, he recorded eight tracks for King Records in New York City, this time using the name Country Paul. Henry Glover met Slim at these sessions and later commented that Slim was "a very sickly young man at the time". 

Slim's style blended Piedmont blues, prominent in songs such as "Carolina Boogie" and his cover version of Fuller's "Rag Mama Rag", with the influence of Hopkins steering him increasingly towards Texas blues. He occasionally incorporated a washboard as well as his guitar, as if to emphasize his Carolina roots. His recordings were not hugely popular but sold in sufficient numbers for him to retain his recording contract. In June 1952, he recorded four more tracks for Savoy, which were his final recordings. 

Slim was a messenger of music, a chronicler of life as it really happened. He was a troubadour of the Blues; a Johnny Appleseed, planting songs in the hearts of people wherever he went on his never ending pilgrimage. But death is seldom more than a stride behind any of us, and it caught up with Carolina Slim far from his beloved sunny fields and tall pine country. He died in a a hospital in Newark, New Jersey, from a heart attack, which occurred during surgery for a back complaint. He was 30 years old, but already a legend. Had he lived, he might have created a modern Piedmont style before record companies' interest in the music disappeared. 

In 1994, Document Records released a compilation album, Complete Recorded Works 1950–1952, which incorporates all of his 27 tracks.    (Edited from liner notes by Wilson Woodrow & Wikipedia)