Jimmy Reed - Rocks (CD)

Release Date: 12/10/21

1-CD (Digipak) with 36-page booklet, 29 tracks. Total playing time is approximately 79 minutes.

Bear Family Records® is the first label to compile Jimmy Reed's rockin', up-tempo sides on one CD album!

This CD includes all his big hits like Big Boss Man, Bright Lights Big City, I Ain't Got You, Shame, Shame, Shame, etc.

Jimmy Reed was an important part of the rock & roll era, his music rocks in the original sense. John Peel once summed it up, 'It's all such great music to funk to.'

One of the great admirers of Jimmy Reed and Eddie Taylor, Texas blues guitarist Jimmy Vaughan, wrote the exclusive foreword to this ROCKS CD!

Vaughan repeatedly underscores the importance of the musicians in his interviews and through recordings of songs by the two.

The booklet features rarely seen photos of Reed and Taylor, scans of original label artwork, and an essay by Reed fan Roland Heinrich Rumtreiber.
Before every rock musician worth his or her salt claimed Robert Johnson as a primary influence and recorded his songs, Jimmy Reed had been the blues musician most frequently covered. If you could spare the time and browse the respective databases online, I bet you shall find more cover versions of Reed's compositions than Johnson's. But, please, save your life energy - listen to Jimmy Reed 'Rocks' on Bear Family Records®!
Everybody covered Jimmy Reed songs: Link Wray, Bill Cosby, Charlie Rich, The Blues Brothers (Jake and Elwood), Betty LaVette, Dale and Ronnie Hawkins, Etta James, Neil Young, The Texas Tornadoes - the list would go on and on. Even the King, while jamming with his old buddies Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana during the televised 1968 Comeback Special, couldn't stop encoring Baby What You Want Me to Do (check uncut versions of the Special). If you think of the '60s R&B boom in England, Jimmy Reed was in everybody's repertoire - alongside Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. And his influence lasted well into the 1990s and beyond, with garage bands and rockabilly acts still mining the Reed catalog.