Track Listing

1. Bright Lights, Big City
2. I'm Mr. Luck
3. What's Wrong, Baby
4. Found Joy
5. Kind of Lonesome
6. Aw Shucks, Hush Your Mouth
7. Tell Me You Love Me
8. Blue Carnegie
9. I'm a Love You
10. Hold Me Close
11. Blue Blue Water
12. Baby, What You Want Me to Do
13. You Don't Have to Go
14. Hush Hush
15. Found Love
16. Honest I Do
17. You Got Me Dizzy
18. Big Boss Man
19. Take Out Some Insurance
20. Boogie in the Dark
21. Going to New York
22. Ain't That Lovin' You Baby
23. Sun Is Shining

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #154900 in Music
• Released on: 2000-06-20
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Live, Original recording remastered

Album Description
Limited edition Japanese pressing has been remastered and comes in a miniature LP sleeve. Vine. 2006.

Customer Reviews

T'ain't live but it sure is classic Jimmy Reed!
Collectable Records recently reissued JIMMMY REED AT CARNEGIE HALL a Vee-Jay album(VJLP 1035) originally released in 1961. The first eleven songs are a recreation of performance Jimmy Reed gave at the "Blues at Carnegie" series(per the liner notes). The liner notes state that the reason the recording could not be done at Carnegie Hall was due to "technical and contractural problems" so the album ended up being recorded at New York City's Bell Sound Studios. Some new tunes, at the time, were written for the Carnegie performance such as "Blue Carnegie"(instrumental) and "Blue, blue, blue." It also includes such Reed classics such as "Ah Shucks,Hush Your Mouth" and "Bright Lights Big City", the first song on the album. The twelve remaining cuts is a best of Jimmy Reed songsfest which are faithful rerecordings of his best known songs. "Take Out Some Insurance" is the only song not written by Jimmy Reed. Although it has the same feel as a Jimmy Reed song the liner notes state that he hated it. Though his singing is sometimes slurred and out of tune, the sound of the blows on his harmonica and his guitar, sometimes accompanied by Eddie Taylor on bass guitar, make his blues songs shine. This cd is a faithul reproduction of the lp including the ever present oval Vee-Jay oval on the front cover along with the original liner notes.

Weirdly titled; excellent music
This CD was originally issued as a double LP by Vee-Jay in the early '60s, and the title is decidedly odd considering that none of these songs are recorded live, or at Carnegie Hall for that matter.
The first dozen tracks, which made up the first of the two original vinyl LPs, are some nice middle-period studio tracks, while the following dozen constitutes a "reissue" of sorts of the Vee-Jay label's "Best Of Jimmy Reed album.

If you're looking for a live document of Jimmy Reed, this ain't it, but stereophiles will love this as the sound is Mobile Fidelity impeccable, even on the mono masters, while stereo masters of such classics as "Baby What You Want Me To Do" and "Big Boss Man" sound almost revelatory.
The various musicians include Reed's lead guitarist and childhood friend, the great Eddie Taylor, as well as Willie Dixon, Curtis Mayfield and Phil Upchurch on bass, pianist Henry Gray, and guitarists Lee Baker and William "Lefty" Bates (who was indeed lefthanded and played his instrument upside down).

In addition to the eleven "Carnegie Hall" tracks, which are supposed to recreate the track list from an actual concert at that venue, the second half of the album features most (but not quite all) of Reed's classic blues shuffles, including crisp renditions of "You Got Me Dizzy", "You Don't Have To Go", "Honest I Do", "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby", and the wrongly titled "Baby What You Want Me To Do" (Jimmy Reed sings, and always did sing, "baby why you wanna let go?").

Critics hated Mathis James Reed's nasal, badly articulated vocal delivery, simple, two-string boogie patterns, and virtual inability on the harmonica, but the record buying public loved him, and he frequently crossed over to the pop charts, an amazing feat for a black blues singer in the 1950s. And Reed outsold everybody from Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf to Little Walter and Elmore James in the process.

The story of Jimmy Reed is a tragic one, really. Illiterate, alcoholic and stricken with undiagnosed epilepsy, Reed was ill equipped to handle fame and fortune, and even though his faithful wife Mary (known to fans as "Mama" Reed) did everything she could to keep him functioning, he ended up slowly falling apart, finally dying at age 50 in 1976. His epilepsy had been diagnosed by then, and he had managed to quit the bottle and was receiving medical treatment, but too late, and he died while trying to make a comeback to the blues circuit.

Rhino's "Blues Masters: The Very Best Of Jimmy Reed" remains the best introduction to Reed's music, and this is not an ideal starting point for newcomers (even with most of the hits aboard), but if you have to have some classic Jimmy Reed in clean stereo, this is the place to go.