It may have been the barbecued goat he ate at fife-and-drum master Otha Turner's annual Labor Day picnic. Or the couple of times he played with hill-country blues rogue R.L. Burnside. Whatever the cause, Eli Reed done gone to the Delta and come back with a fancy nickname and a musical mission.
Anyone who's been to the Mississippi Delta knows what a special, often spooky place it can be. For musicians inclined toward the blues, it can become a place where, to paraphrase that most famous of blues songs, your mojo may indeed begin workin'.
No one of his generation knows the Delta's power to inspire better than the 24-year-old Reed, whose habit of wearing a newsboy's cap earned him the nickname "Paperboy" during a momentous nine months he spent living and playing music in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He'd moved south from his native Boston for a gig at a local radio station, a plan that suddenly changed when the station's owner lost his financial backing and Reed's job evaporated.
"So there I was. I had this apartment and a little bit of money, and I didn't know what there was as far as music, going on. I didn't think about it as, 'Oh, this is where I'm going to get my legs, my experience.' I just wanted to move out of the house, not go to college, and live on my own for a little while. I hadn't even established that I was a performer. I just wanted to kind of go."
A natural musician who sang and began playing harmonica as a kid- the poor child had a music critic for a father- Reed switched to tenor saxophone in time to play in the Brookline High School jazz band. By the time he'd landed in Clarksdale, he'd shifted again, this time to guitar (a '56 Gibson ES 225) and what had always been his truest love, singing. Asked by an acquaintance in that Delta burg if he wanted to play a club just for beer, he found himself onstage at Red's Lounge, leading a band for the first time. Nervous, he began calling out blues tunes he knew, and the crowd bought it. It was in this experience- which he now calls "really scary" and "very bizarre"- that "Paperboy" was born.
"I found out all of a sudden that there was this really thriving little juke-joint community- a middle-aged black community that was into chitlin'-circuit R&B and also, still, Howlin' Wolf and stuff like that", Reed says between sips of beer in a bar near where he now lives in Brooklyn. "I basically dove in headfirst, and never left the black community the whole time I was there."
IT wasn't long before he gravitated towards playing predominately black R&B and soul music. By the time he moved back north for a short-lived attempt at higher education, studying cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago, Reed was writing songs and planning a career in music. In summer 2004, he returned to Massachusetts and recorded his first record, Eli "Paperboy" Reed Sings Walkin' and Talkin' and other Smash Hits. Made up of covers and two original songs, including pressing. Encouraged, Reed began touring up and down the eastern seaboard, and Reed began touring up and down the eastern seaboard, and formed the first solid version of his seven-piece band, the True Loves. Soon after, he signed with Boston indie label Q Division, whose biggest acts to date have been the Gigolo Aunts, the Flying Nuns, and Crown Victoria the side project of Buffalo Tom frontman Bill Janovitz. Other than Reed, Q Division's current roster is oriented toward solo singer-songwriters.