Exclusive Premiere: Eli Paperboy Reed Revisits His Roots-Driven Blues Debut with ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Cry’

A week after I graduated high school, barely 18, I moved to Clarksdale, MS. The reasons are a little complicated, but what matters is that as soon as I arrived I was immersed in a world that was at once completely foreign and completely familiar. I learned quickly that this Mississippi, though, was not the Mississippi of Robert Johnson or Son House. It was the Mississippi of Tyrone Davis, of Bobby Rush, Otis Clay, and Latimore.

Before I could blink, I had myself a steady gig as the guitar player for the Wesley Jefferson Southern Soul Band. We played every Sunday night at a place called The Do Drop Inn in the even smaller town of Shelby, MS. It turned out that the guitar player also had to be the singer and front man.

I took my licks trying to figure out how to do that on the first few gigs, but by the 3rd or 4th I had it  sort of figured out. I loved Southern Soul music as much as I loved blues and the people who came to the Do Drop (mostly middle-aged, pretty much all Black) took kindly to the idea of this 18 year old white kid singing “I Don’t Do Windows” and “Chicken Heads.” After they got over the incongruity of it all, though, they let me keep on singing and didn’t throw me out. 

The bass player in the Wesley Jefferson Southern Soul Band was a guy named Willie Butler who everyone called “Rip.” (Everyone had a nickname, Wesley was “Junebug” or just “Bug.” I, as you might guess, became “Paperboy.”

Rip drove a school bus for the Coahoma county school district during the week and at The Do Drop he was mostly content to sit in back with his bass, Newport hanging loosely from his lips, and play whatever I happened to call. Every now and then, though, he would hand the bass off to someone else and he would get up and sing. He had his few songs that were his signatures, but the one that got everyone going was O.V. Wright’s “You Gonna Make me Cry.”

Rip would take that song and just wear it out. Watching him do that, dropping to his knees on the dirt floor, eliciting the screams of the delighted women in the audience showed me what Soul music really was. It made me want to do THAT. To be THAT. 

Those moments in that place, that man and that song, influenced me more than almost anything else. Rip died in 2014, but I like to think that he’s smiling, just like he always was on the bandstand, playing, singing and living the blues.

This shot was taken at the Do Drop Inn in Shelby, MS. Some Sunday I brought a disposal camera to capture the scene, and I am very glad that I did. That’s Michael “Dr. Mike” James on to my far right and Rip Butler in the middle. You can’t really see, but I assume it’s Joe Willie “Iceman” Williams playing drums. He was there most Sundays. 

I was the only person around besides Johnnie Billington (the elder statesman on the scene) who played a hollow body guitar and they made fun of me for that, calling me an old man. I imagine I was singing Bobby Bland’s “That Did It” or Johnnie Taylor’s version of “Steal Away.” Or maybe the crowd favorite “Let’s Straighten it Out” by Latimore. Any given Sunday.