Eddie "Guitar" Burns (February 8, 1928 – December 12, 2012) was an American Detroit blues guitarist, harmonica player, and singer and songwriter. Among Detroit bluesmen, Burns was deemed to have been exceeded in stature by only John Lee Hooker.
Born in Belzoni, Mississippi, he grew up in the small town of Dublin, close to Clarksdale, where he became acquainted with the popular blues artists of the 30s and 40s by hearing their records in his grandfather's club. His father was a sharecropper who performed as a singer in medicine shows, but Burns was raised mainly by his grandparents. He was self-taught in playing the harmonica and made his first guitar. His favourites were, and remained, the singer and harmonica player John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson and the rough-hewn Mississippi singer-guitarist Tommy McClennan. He remembered a childhood encounter with "the other Sonny Boy" (Aleck "Rice" Miller), who would later become famous throughout the Mississippi delta for his appearances on the radio show King Biscuit Time.
Burns left home at 16 and, after a spell in Clarksdale, moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where he worked for a couple of years for the Illinois Central railroad and for the John Deere tractor company, and played music with the guitarist John T Smith. In 1948, the two men relocated to Detroit. Burns recalled: "We was playing at a house party this particular Saturday night, in Detroit's Black Bottom, and we didn't know it but a celebrity was living right back of us in something almost like a horse stable: John Lee Hooker."
Burns went along to a recording session with Hooker and played a nagging harmonica accompaniment on Miss Eloise and Burnin' Hell. Hooker, in turn, accompanied Burns at a 1951 session produced by the Detroit entrepreneur Joe Von Battle, but these recordings would not be issued until many years later. "Eddie Burns is the musician I was closest to," Hooker told the blues writer Jas Obrecht. "When I first met him, he was only playin' harmonica, and oooh, he was so good!" But Burns was also developing as a guitarist, and in 1966, when he and Hooker were reunited on Hooker's Chess album The Real Folk Blues, he played guitar throughout.
Over several decades, Burns made many estimable records of his own. From the first, on his 1948 debut recordings with Smith, Papa's Boogie and Notoriety Woman, he showed his admiration for the urgent singing and playing style of Williamson, homage he continued to pay on Hello Miss Jessie Lee (1952), a reworking of Williamson's signature piece Good Morning Little School Girl, and on numerous later recordings. He married in 1953 and had several children. He had some regional success in 1957 with Treat Me Like I Treat You and in 1961 with Orange Driver, based on Williamson's My Black Name Blues, with a young and still barely known Marvin Gaye on drums.
(Edited from Tony Russell obit @ The Guardian & Wikipedia)