Jimmy Reed

Among blues styles, none matches Jimmy Reed’s for sheer ease of absorption, approachability, instant identifiability, or straightforward execution on voice and guitar alike. The songs most closely associated with him—“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 embedded themselves so thoroughly in the standard blues songbook that they feel as though they have always existed. Because his method was plain and readily copied, the material reached performers as diverse as high-school garage bands and established names such as Elvis Presley, Charlie Rich, Lou Rawls, Hank Williams, Jr., and the Rolling Stones, rendering Reed perhaps the most influential bluesman in the long term. The bottom-string boogie figures on guitar—all supplied by his childhood friend and lifelong partner Eddie Taylor—along with his elementary two-string turnarounds, rural harmonica passages played through a neck-rack harness, and slurred vocals constituted most white listeners’ first encounter with the blues. His music, relaxed yet steadily propulsive and built on the same reliable framework, created a template that enjoyed enormous commercial and artistic success with both mature Black audiences and young white listeners for roughly a dozen years. Reed’s singles landed on the R&B charts with remarkable consistency and crossed over to the pop listings on multiple occasions, an uncommon achievement for an unvarnished blues artist. The feat seems all the more striking because, on the surface, his recordings displayed no obvious distinction; he commanded little technical facility on either instrument, and his singing lacked the commanding force of Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters. It was precisely this lack of overt confrontation, however, that allowed Jimmy Reed to become a staple in countless record collections throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Billy Vera captured the appeal for aspiring musicians in the liner notes to a Reed anthology when he wrote, “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 entered the world on September 6, 1925, on a plantation near the small Mississippi town of Dunleith. He remained in the area until age fifteen, absorbing basic harmonica and guitar techniques from Eddie Taylor, who was already performing at country suppers and juke joints. In 1943 Reed moved to Chicago, only to be drafted into the Navy for a two-year stint. Following a brief return to Mississippi and his marriage to Mary—later known to fans as “Mama Reed”—he settled in Gary, Indiana, taking a job at an Armour Foods packing plant while beginning to perform in the local blues scene and in nearby Chicago. During the early 1950s he worked as a sideman with John Brim’s Gary Kings, contributing harmonica to Brim’s “Tough Times” and its instrumental counterpart “Gary Stomp,” and also busked on the streets alongside Willie Joe Duncan, who played an amplified homemade one-string instrument called a Unitar. After an unsuccessful audition for Chess Records—an outcome that would later become ironic given Reed’s chart achievements—Brim’s drummer at the time, Albert King, introduced him to the fledgling Vee-Jay label, where he cut his first sides. There he reunited with Eddie Taylor, and their musical partnership continued intermittently until Reed’s death. Initial recognition came slowly, yet when his third single, “You Don’t Have to Go” backed with “Boogie in the Dark,” reached number five on Billboard’s R&B chart, a steady run of hits followed for the next decade.

Although outselling Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, and Little Walter brought fame, no one was less prepared to manage it than Jimmy Reed. Barely literate and facing a punishing tour schedule once he became a headliner, the self-described “liquor glutter” quickly unraveled. His elaborate attempts to conceal his drinking and the erratic conduct that resulted soon made him a figure of amusement among fellow performers. Colleagues who shared bills at prestigious venues such as the Apollo Theater still recount the incident in which he urinated on a star performer’s dress backstage, wondering how he could remain upright long enough to captivate an audience. Accounts also persist of Reed being placed in a Chicago drunk tank the night before a scheduled recording date. When epilepsy struck in 1957, the condition went undiagnosed for some time because its seizures were mistaken for episodes of delirium tremens. Eddie Taylor later described sitting directly in front of Reed in the studio, cueing him on when to sing, when to play harmonica, and when to execute guitar turnarounds. Reed also struggled to recall lyrics to newly written songs, even his own; Mama Reed would sit nearby and feed him lines one at a time. Listeners can still hear her assisting on several major hits, notably “Big Boss Man” and “Bright Lights, Big City,” where she joins in to keep him on tempo.

None of these difficulties diminished public enthusiasm. While later critics have emphasized the limited variety in Reed’s output or the formulaic quality of his final sessions, audiences continued to embrace the music. He placed eleven singles on Billboard’s Hot 100 and fourteen on the R&B charts, totals that surpassed those of the more polished B.B. King. As the old adage might be adapted, nobody liked Jimmy Reed but the people.

Reed’s gradual physical decline coincided with the collapse of Vee-Jay Records, which folded around the time his last single for the label, “Don’t Think I’m Through,” appeared. Manager Al Smith secured a deal with the new ABC-Bluesway imprint, resulting in several albums through the 1970s that lacked the earlier spark and sounded mechanically assembled. Reed attempted one final album that tried to modernize his sound with funk rhythms and wah-wah effects before withdrawing from public view. He eventually received proper treatment for epilepsy and stopped drinking, yet the damage was irreversible. He died on August 29, 1976, while attempting a return to the blues festival circuit.

All of this remains profoundly sad, for Jimmy Reed’s recordings overflow with unmistakable joy. That joy surfaces whenever one of his classic tracks plays. Although his stripped-down approach influenced British Invasion groups and an entire generation of Louisiana swamp-blues artists, most notably Slim Harpo and Jimmy Anderson, the plain truth endures: like so many other originators of the form, there was only one Jimmy Reed.