Jimmy Reed

blues singer; guitarist; harmonica player

Personal Information

Born on September 6, 1925, in or near Leland, MS; died on August 29, 1976, in Oakland, CA; son of Joseph (a sharecropper) and Virginia (Ross) Reed; married; wife's name Mary, later known as "Mama" Reed; children: Loretta, Jimmy Jr., Arlene, Michael, Malinda, Roslyn, Rosemary, Avery
Military/Wartime Service: Served in U.S. Navy, 1944-45.

Career

Sang in church choirs and did farm work in Mississippi, late 1930s and early 1940s; worked in steel mill, Chicago, IL, 1943-44; worked in foundry and later in meatpacking plant, Gary, IN, late 1940s; performed blues on street for tips, 1948; performed in clubs in Gary and Chicago, early 1950s; recorded for Vee Jay label, 1953-65; recorded for Bluesway label, 1968; numerous chart hits; toured extensively; sidelined by illness, 1969; performed at clubs and blues festivals, early 1970s.

Life's Work

Blues music has had its individualists--performers with powerful, poetic feeling, tremendous instrumental virtuosity, or a unique sound. But the tradition has also had its Everymen and Everywomen, and one of these was Jimmy Reed, the most popular Chicago blues performer of the 1950s and early 1960s. Reed had a guitar technique that rarely varied, and his vocals were relaxed to the point where hearers couldn't always understand the words he sang. Yet Reed found a groove and stuck to it, creating a sound that any blues fan could identify after hearing only a few seconds of his music. That sound, moreover, influenced nearly every rock music ensemble that had a blues element in its style. Reed's music distilled the essence of the blues.

Reed's life followed a course outwardly similar to those of many other Chicago bluesmen. Mathis James Reed was born in the Mississippi River Delta, in or near Leland, Mississippi, on September 6, 1925, and he and his nine siblings grew up working the fields on a sharecroppers' plantation. Reed and his childhood friend Eddie Taylor, who would later play in Reed's band, taught themselves to play the guitar and harmonica whenever they could get away from farm work. But Reed's main musical activity when he was young consisted of singing in church choirs. Reed dropped out of school in his early teens to work the fields full time in nearby Duncan and Meltonia, Mississippi.

Started on Streets of Chicago

The entry of the United States into World War II brought news of factory jobs in Chicago to the Delta, and Reed followed countless other young people northward. But after a short time in Chicago he was drafted into the Navy himself. After his discharge in 1945 he returned to Mississippi, where he married and, with his wife Mary, raised a family of eight children. Mary, who would become known as "Mama" Reed, would go on to compose many of his most popular songs. By 1948 the couple were living in Gary, Indiana, and Reed was working in a steel mill. Later he worked as a butcher at the Armour Corporation's meatpacking plant.

After the experience of living in Chicago, however, Reed had become more and more interested in playing the guitar. "There was a tavern--it wasn't no 'club'--across the street from my house when I was living in South Chicago," he told Guitar Player interviewer Dan Forte (as reprinted in the Blues Guitar collection). "I said to myself, 'Well, if these guys can play in here--I don't see too much that they're doing--I think I could do some of the same thing.'" Reed bought an electric guitar and amplifier and began practicing in the alley behind his house. He honed his style by recording his own sessions on blank 78 rpm discs with a crude recording machine and listening critically to the results.

Soon Reed was playing for substantial tips on the streets with washtub bassist Willie Joe Duncan. He reunited with Taylor, and the two began playing in Chicago and Gary, Indiana, lounges. Reed began to think about joining the Windy City's growing blues recording scene and, with some newly acquired harmonica skills inspired by listening to the elder Sonny Boy Williamson, Reed cut some demonstration 78s. In 1953 he took them to the city's premier blues entrepreneur, Leonard Chess. Chess, to his later dismay, brushed Reed off, but Jimmy Bracken, whose wife Vivian Carter was a Gary, Indiana, disc jockey, overheard the audition. Bracken and Carter were planning to launch a new label, Vee Jay, whose name was formed by combining their initials, and they jumped at the chance to bring Reed into the studio.

Rose and Fell With Vee Jay

Reed's languid, simple sound, with its roots still deep in the Delta, took a few years to sink in with blues listeners, and several Vee Jay releases went nowhere. But one evening in 1954, as Reed was coming home from work at Armour, he heard his recording "You Don't Have to Go" on the radio. The announcer said, "That's Jimmy Reed; he's going to be out in Atlanta, Georgia, this Friday and Saturday night," Reed told Forte. "And this was Thursday evening! I didn't know that I was booked in Atlanta." Reed convinced Taylor to accompany him to the gig, and never returned to his meatpacking job.

"You Don't Have to Go," a "Mama" Reed composition, was a hit even overseas, and one Vee Jay Reed release after another began to reach the charts. Reed placed 18 singles in the Billboard rhythm-and-blues chart between 1955 and 1961, more than any other musician. Well in advance of the 1960s blues revival, Reed's records crossed over to white audiences, and 12 of his records made the pop charts. His single biggest hit was "Bright Lights, Big City" in 1961, but several other Reed releases became blues standards almost from their dates of release. "Big Boss Man," "Baby, What You Want Me to Do," and "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby" were universally known among blues listeners and fans, as well as among the white rock bands who began to emulate Chicago blues in the 1960s.

"There's simply no sound in the blues as easily digestible, accessible, instantly recognizable, and as easy to play and sing as the music of Jimmy Reed," noted Cub Koda of the All Music Guide. Reed enjoyed several more years on top after his string of hits ended, playing top venues like New York's Apollo Theater and even Carnegie Hall. But by the mid-1960s listeners had begun to tire of Reed's walking boogie woogie bass lines and brief harmonica interjections. The Vee Jay label hit hard times, and Reed proved unable to deal with the pressures of success. "I wasn't never no pot smoker, and I never did fool with any of that cocaine or junk or crazy pills, but I'd drink me some liquor," Reed told Forte. He sunk deeper into alcoholism, becoming the butt of jokes among his fellow blues musicians.

Worse still, Reed's increasingly severe epileptic seizures were mistakenly chalked up to delirium tremens, the "shakes" that accompany long-term alcohol abuse. By 1969 he was forced to stop performing and check into a veterans' administration hospital in Downey, Illinois. Reed continued to record, with Taylor or his wife giving him cues as to what words he should sing or when to begin playing. He subsequently released several albums on the ABC-Bluesway label, but they were generally thought to be inferior to his work for Vee Jay. In 1976 Reed went through an alcoholism treatment program and successfully quit drinking. Prospects seemed bright for a comeback in the blues festival scene, but Reed died in Oakland, California, from the effects of an epileptic seizure, on August 29, 1976.

Awards

Inducted into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1991.

Works

Selected discography

• Lost in the Shuffle, 32 Jazz, 1997.
• His Greatest Recordings: Original Classics, Aim, 1998.
• Boss Man: Best of Jimmy Reed, Recall, 1999.
• Blues Masters: The Very Best of Jimmy Reed, Rhino, 2000.
• Big Boss Man (boxed set), Collectables, 2001.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Musicians, Volume 15, Gale, 1995.
• Harris, Sheldon, Blues Who's Who, repr. ed., Da Capo, 1991.
• Herzhaft, Gérard, Encyclopedia of the Blues, University of Arkansas Press, 1992.
• Obrecht, Jas, ed., Blues Guitar: The Men Who Made the Music, GPI Books, 1990.
• Rucker, Leland, ed., MusicHound Blues: The Essential Album Guide, Visible Ink, 1998.
• Slonimsky, Nicolas, ed. emeritus, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music and Musicians, centennial ed., Schirmer, 2001.

Periodicals

• Observer (London, England), August 11, 2002, p. 14.

On-line

• All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com
• Lycos Music, http://music.lycos.com
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, http://www.rockhall.com

— James M. Manheim

See Jimmy Reed Lyrics

• Born: September 06, 1925, Dunleith, MS
• Died: August 29, 1976, Oakland, CA
• Active: '50s, '60s, '70s
• Genres: Blues
• Instrument: Harmonica, Vocals, Guitar
• Representative Albums: "Blues Masters: The Very Best of Jimmy Reed," "The Best of the Vee-Jay Years," "Speak the Lyrics to Me, Mama Reed"
• Representative Songs: "Big Boss Man," "Bright Lights, Big City," "Honest I Do"

Biography

There's simply no sound in the blues as easily digestible, accessible, instantly recognizable, and as easy to play and sing as the music of Jimmy Reed. His best-known songs -- "Baby, What You Want Me to Do," "Bright Lights, Big City," "Honest I Do," "You Don't Have to Go," "Going to New York," "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby," and "Big Boss Man" -- have become such an integral part of the standard blues repertoire, it's almost as if they have existed forever. Because his style was simple and easily imitated, his songs were accessible to just about everyone from high-school garage bands having a go at it, to Elvis Presley, Charlie Rich, Lou Rawls, Hank Williams, Jr., and the Rolling Stones, making him -- in the long run -- perhaps the most influential bluesman of all. His bottom-string boogie rhythm guitar patterns (all furnished by boyhood friend and longtime musical partner Eddie Taylor), simple two-string turnarounds, country-ish harmonica solos (all played in a neck-rack attachment hung around his neck), and mush-mouthed vocals were probably the first exposure most white folks had to the blues. And his music -- lazy, loping, and insistent and constantly built and reconstructed single after single on the same sturdy frame -- was a formula that proved to be enormously successful and influential, both with middle-aged blacks and young white audiences for a good dozen years. Jimmy Reed records hit the R&B charts with amazing frequency and crossed over onto the pop charts on many occasions, a rare feat for an unreconstructed bluesman. This is all the more amazing simply because Reed's music was nothing special on the surface; he possessed absolutely no technical expertise on either of his chosen instruments and his vocals certainly lacked the fierce declamatory intensity of a Howlin' Wolf or a Muddy Waters. But it was exactly that lack of in-your-face musical confrontation that made Jimmy Reed a welcome addition to everybody's record collection back in the '50s and '60s. And for those aspiring musicians who wanted to give the blues a try, either vocally or instrumentally (no matter what skin color you were born with), perhaps Billy Vera said it best in his liner notes to a Reed greatest-hits anthology: "Yes, anybody with a range of more than six notes could sing Jimmy's tunes and play them the first day Mom and Dad brought home that first guitar from Sears & Roebuck. I guess Jimmy could be termed the '50s punk bluesman."

Reed was born on September 6, 1925, on a plantation in or around the small burg of Dunleith, MS. He stayed around the area until he was 15, learning the basic rudiments of harmonica and guitar from his buddy Eddie Taylor, who was then making a name for himself as a semi-pro musician, working country suppers and juke joints. Reed moved up to Chicago in 1943, but was quickly drafted into the Navy where he served for two years. After a quick trip back to Mississippi and marriage to his beloved wife Mary (known to blues fans as "Mama Reed"), he relocated to Gary, IN, and found work at an Armour Foods meat packing plant while simultaneously breaking into the burgeoning blues scene around Gary and neighboring Chicago. The early '50s found him working as a sideman with John Brim's Gary Kings (that's Reed blowing harp on Brim's classic "Tough Times" and its instrumental flipside, "Gary Stomp") and playing on the street for tips with Willie Joe Duncan, a shadowy figure who played an amplified, homemade one-string instrument called a Unitar. After failing an audition with Chess Records (his later chart success would be a constant thorn in the side of the firm), Brim's drummer at the time -- improbably enough, future blues guitar legend Albert King -- brought him over to the newly formed Vee-Jay Records, where his first recordings were made. It was during this time that he was reunited and started playing again with Eddie Taylor, a musical partnership that would last off and on until Reed's death. Success was slow in coming, but when his third single, "You Don't Have to Go" backed with "Boogie in the Dark," made the number five slot on Billboard's R&B charts, the hits pretty much kept on coming for the next decade.

But if selling more records than Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, or Little Walter brought the rewards of fame to his doorstep, no one was more ill-equipped to handle them than Jimmy Reed. With signing his name for fans being the total sum of his literacy, combined with a back-breaking road schedule once he became a name attraction and his self-description as a "liquor glutter," Reed started to fall apart like a cheap suit almost immediately. His devious schemes to tend to his alcoholism -- and the just plain aberrant behavior that came as a result of it -- quickly made him the laughingstock of his show-business contemporaries. Those who shared the bill with him in top-of-the-line R&B venues like the Apollo Theater -- where the story of him urinating on a star performer's dress in the wings has been repeated verbatim by more than one old-timer -- still shake their heads and wonder how Reed could actually stand up straight and perform, much less hold the audience in the palm of his hand. Other stories of Reed being "arrested" and thrown into a Chicago drunk tank the night before a recording session also reverberate throughout the blues community to this day. Little wonder then that when he was stricken with epilepsy in 1957, it went undiagnosed for an extended period of time, simply because he had experienced so many attacks of delirium tremens, better known as the "DTs." Eddie Taylor would relate how he sat directly in front of Reed in the studio, instructing him while the tune was being recorded exactly when to start to start singing, when to blow his harp, and when to do the turnarounds on his guitar. Jimmy Reed also appears, by all accounts, to have been unable to remember the lyrics to new songs -- even ones he had composed himself -- and Mama Reed would sit on a piano bench and whisper them into his ear, literally one line at a time. Blues fans who doubt this can clearly hear the proof on several of Jimmy's biggest hits, most notably "Big Boss Man" and "Bright Lights, Big City," where she steps into the fore and starts singing along with him in order to keep him on the beat.

But seemingly none of this mattered. While revisionist blues historians like to make a big deal about either the lack of variety of his work or how later recordings turned him into a mere parody of himself, the public just couldn't get enough of it. Jimmy Reed placed 11 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 pop charts and a total of 14 on the R&B charts, a figure that even a much more sophisticated artist like B.B. King couldn't top. To paraphrase the old saying, nobody liked Jimmy Reed but the people.

Reed's slow descent into the ravages of alcoholism and epilepsy roughly paralleled the decline of Vee-Jay Records, which went out of business at approximately the same time that his final 45 was released, "Don't Think I'm Through." His manager, Al Smith, quickly arranged a contract with the newly formed ABC-Bluesway label and a handful of albums were released into the '70s, all of them lacking the old charm, sounding as if they were cut on a musical assembly line. Jimmy did one last album, a horrible attempt to update his sound with funk beats and wah-wah pedals, before becoming a virtual recluse in his final years. He finally received proper medical attention for his epilepsy and quit drinking, but it was too late and he died trying to make a comeback on the blues festival circuit on August 29, 1976.

All of this is sad beyond belief, simply because there's so much joy in Jimmy Reed's music. And it's that joy that becomes self-evident every time you give one of his classic sides a spin. Although his bare-bones style influenced everyone from British Invasion combos to the entire school of Louisiana swamp blues artists (Slim Harpo and Jimmy Anderson in particular), the simple indisputable fact remains that -- like so many of the other originators in the genre -- there was only one Jimmy Reed. ~ Cub Koda, All Music Guide

Best of the Vee-Jay Years Buy this CD	Boss Man Buy this CD	Sun Is Shining Buy this CD	Masters Buy this CD	Lost in the Shuffle Buy this CD
School's Out Buy this CD	Very Best of Jimmy Reed Buy this CD	Big Boss Man [Box Set] Buy this CD	Story Songs and Voices of the Blues Buy this CD	His Greatest Recordings: Original Classic Series Buy this CD

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