Eli “Paperboy” Reed seems out of place at the 2007 Boston Music Awards. The event, held at the Orpheum Theatre in December last year, is mostly dominated by pop-punk, metal, and hip-hop acts. Reed and his blues buddies, including the likes of James Montgomery, David Hull, Johnny A, Barrence Whitfield, and George Leh, share the stage midway through the evening. Reed sticks out like a sore thumb; he must be one of the only guys on stage below the age of forty. He takes his place downstage, waits for his cue, and lets it rip. A voice one would never expect from this conservatively dressed, clean-cut kid. He’s got a cry straight from the analog days of James Brown or Little Richard. Steadily leading the crowd through his growing intensity, it’s not long until every head in the crowd is turned and focused on his every move.

Unfortunately, Reed’s performance was an exception in his genre in this town. While Reed highlighted the blues portion of the show, the theater seemed half-empty throughout fellow soul/ R&B singer Bobby Brown’s set, which seemed to take up half the night. Having grown up in Boston, birthplace of such blues-based acts as the J. Geils Band and Aerosmith, a city with a rich R&B tradition but shrinking modern blues scene, Reed found that in order to gain his voice as a performer, he had to search abroad.