A leading figure of the largely overlooked Nashville blues scene, Johnny Jones was an outstanding guitarist who helped to launch the musical career of Jimi Hendrix. And it was with a Hendrix tune, Purple Haze, that Jones first attracted attention in the UK. He was born in 1936 in the small Tennessee town of Edes to a musical family. His father sang in local gospel groups, and his grandmother had a Victrola wind-up gramophone on which he would hear 78s by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Peetie Wheatstraw. He visited Memphis at 13 and saw the famous one-man blues band Joe Hill Louis, playing in Beale Street. His parents separated when he still at home and he moved with his mother to Chicago in 1951. He was immediately attracted to the blues scene and would hang around the 708 Club, where he saw Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf perform.

He shared an apartment with Walter McCollum, a blues harmonica player, and formed a small group that would work with performers such as Freddy King and Junior Wells.

In 1957 Jones left Chicago for work in Wichita, Kansas, and later Memphis, arriving back in Nashville with a band that included two guitars, bass and a couple of female impersonators. Here, he was spotted by a local producer, the songwriter and label owner Ted Jarrett, who took him on tour with the Nashville vocalists Gene Allison and Christine Kitterell.

Jarrett also expanded Jones’s musical horizons: “He had enough to see my potential,” Jones said. “I’m a blues man, had a blues foundation, but Nashville was country, jazz and gospel and Ted was behind all the local stuff.”

Jones worked as a lead guitarist on countless Jarrett-produced recording sessions and during the early 1960s formed his own band, the Imperial Seven. Its members included Hal Nesbitt and the bass-player Billy Cox. It was Cox who invited his former army colleague Jimi Hendrix to sit in with the band.

“I can tell you many stories about him — boy, he was far out then,” Jones told the music researcher Ray Topping in 1997. “I gave him some tuition on string bending but even then he was out on his own.”

Cox and Hendrix were later reunited when Hendrix formed the Band of Gypsies in 1969.

Jones joined the backing band for a pioneering Dallas TV R&B show, The Beat, hosted by the disc jockey Bill “Hoss” Allen. Jones provided the backing for performers such as Etta James, Little Milton and Freddy King and also cut a a couple of singles under his own name for record labels owned by Allen. In 1968 he formed a new band, the King Casuals and had several releases on the larger Brunswick label, including a soul-styled version of Hendrix’s hit Purple Haze. This eventually found its way across the Atlantic to the Northern Soul clubs of Britain.

In a book dedicated to the top 500 Northern Soul records, the author Kev Roberts recalled it being played in the early 1970s at the Golden Torch Club in Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent, where, with its chanted lyrics, it demanded audience participation.

The track’s success also came at a time when the Northern Soul scene was becoming known for the use of artificial stimulants. One West Midlands soul fan recalled it as “a hazy, fuzzy dancer, that seemed to work hand in hand with the pills”. The success that Jones enjoyed in the UK was not mirrored in the US. He worked with Bobby Bland’s road band in the late 1970s, but for some years he found work elsewhere hard to come by. That changed in the late 1990s, however, in a resurgence of interest in the Nashville blues scene. He recorded two solo albums and also appeared at European blues festivals.

His role in the history of Nashville blues was also honoured at the Night Train to Nashville exhibition in 2004 and a track of his was included in the official exhibition CD.

He continued to perform and played at the annual Jefferson Street Blues and Jazz festival as recently as June.

Johnny Jones, blues guitarist, was born on August 17, 1936. He was found dead on October 14, 2009, aged 73