Jimmy Reed was one of the biggest and most popular stars in blues in the 1950s and 1960s, and is widely considered to have been the artist that first drew large white audiences to blues music. He is best known for creating a large body of blues songs that, because of their relatively simple structures, became some of the most heavily covered songs in all of blues. This made him an enormous influence on the generations of players that followed. These songs include “Big Boss Man,” “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” and “Ain't That Lovin' You Baby.”

Reed was born in Dunleith, Mississippi, in 1925. He moved to the Chicago area in 1948, where he played with longtime friend, guitarist Eddie Taylor. Together the two created eighteen top-twenty hits on the R&B charts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a feat that no other blues musician of the time was able to reproduce. Unfortunately, Reed suffered from both crippling alcoholism and undiagnosed epilepsy, a combination that brought his meteoric career to an early close. Reed died in Oakland, California, in 1976.