Jimmy Reed

Jimmy Reed was the youngest of ten children of sharecroppers near Dunleith. He left school after third grade for the fields, and a relative gave him his first guitar when he was ten. At noon he would slip away from his work to hear Sonny Boy Williamson, Sonny Boy Williamson II and Robert Jr. Lockwood on the King Biscuit Time radio show. After a stint in a gospel quartet at Shaw, he worked plantations around Duncan and there met Eddie Taylor, the guitarist who would stand beside him for years.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 9.8 mi
  A museum built around the brick cotton gin in Indianola where B.B. King worked in the 1940s, with his grave in a memorial garden on the grounds.
• Winterville Mounds — 14 mi
  A Mississippian ceremonial center north of Greenville, built by hand from about AD 1000, with a 55-foot Temple Mound and twelve of its original twenty-three mounds still standing.
• Greenville Levee and the 1927 Flood — 15 mi
  The Mississippi River levee at Greenville, where thousands of mostly Black refugees camped in the flood of April 1927 and where the Department of Archives and History has placed markers.
• Dockery Farms — 22 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.

More markers nearby

• Charley Patton's Grave — 3.3 mi
• Tyrone Davis — 5.6 mi
• Son Thomas — 5.6 mi
• Johnny Winter — 5.7 mi