Jimmy Reed – The Best of the Vee-Jay Years
David Cantwell
Posted On November 1, 2007
The blues, as generally practiced today, is shorthand for tedious and interminable guitar solos, for audiences scarcely more animated than a festival-lawn full of Terra Cotta Chinese warriors, and for singers who seem deficient in sincerity and irony both. There was a time, though, not so long ago really, when the blues was for dancing, more about the beat than the solo, and expressed in a voice Ralph Ellison characterized as “a near tragic, near comic lyricism.” There was a time when the blues was Jimmy Reed.
Not that you’d get that from blues histories. Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues, for instance, is probably the best book ever written about the delta blues and its amplified Chicago descendents. It devotes exactly two paragraphs to Reed, which is one paragraph more than he’s awarded in a lot of books.
In the day, though, Reed was, per the song most associated with him, the Big Boss Man (ironically, one of the few hits he didn’t write himself). On Chicago’s south side, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were his only rivals. And out of town, there wasn’t really even a rivalry, at least not on the radio. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Reed repeatedly placed records in the Billboard R&B top-10 — in an era when the blues had all but entirely given way to soul — and he even routinely cracked the pop charts, something neither Muddy nor Wolf accomplished even once.
Compared to those bluesmen, Reed’s bands were less boisterous with their rhythms, though no less chugging and insistent, and both his harp playing and his singing were slurred and quiet, like tipsy conversation. On record, he sounds like he’s just jawing with you out on the stoop — so why shout?
The best songs from those records, collected here on the eighteen-cut The Best Of The Vee-Jay Years, have been endlessly covered over the decades, in the process helping to provide American roots music with much of its very language: “Bright Lights, Big City”, “Baby What You Want Me To Do”, “High And Lonesome”, “Honest I Do”, “I Ain’t Got You”, “Big Boss Man”, and so on.
Near tragic, near comic, and all the way grown-up, Reed’s music is filled with the deep-down-in-the-dumps emotion we still call blues. Reed faces those emotions with the spirited, life-affirming music and aesthetic lightness of touch that people once called the blues.
