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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
Source:
http://www.mp3.com/jimmy-reed/artists/401/biography.htmll
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