Fillmore Slim

Blues guitarist and San Francisco street figure whose second career outlasted his first by four decades.

Clarence Sims was born in Louisiana in 1934 by his own account, though published sources disagree on the date and on whether the city was New Orleans or Baton Rouge. He moved to Los Angeles in 1955 and then to San Francisco, played the clubs of the Fillmore District, and took the neighborhood's name for the stage. His debut single appeared on Dooto Records; he recorded under several other names and opened for B.B. King and Dinah Washington.

He pimped in San Francisco from the mid-1960s into the early 1980s and acquired the honorifics the subculture hands out — "West Coast Godfather of the Game," "the Pope of Pimping." In 1980 federal charges over an attempt to buy forged passports sent him to the federal prison at Texarkana, Texas. Interviewed at length in the Hughes brothers' 1999 documentary, he gave figures for the number of women he had controlled that no source has ever substantiated and that function in the film as boast rather than testimony.

Music became the longer career. Born to Sing the Blues appeared in 1987 under the name Clarence "Guitar" Sims, followed by records for Fedora and Mountain Top. He entered the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame in 2008, took the Lowell Fulson award in 2011, published a memoir with Shoestring Sue, and was still booked in San Francisco clubs in late 2025.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Clarence Sims

BORN
Louisiana, 7 November 1934 (his own stated date)

STATUS
Living — performing in San Francisco as recently as December 2025

ERA
1960s–present

ASSOCIATED WITH
San Francisco, California

STANDING
Documented