Probably from northern Mississippi, Hull and Reed, together with guitarist Sunny Wilson, formed a small group of black songsters. Reed and Wilson’s two-guitar accompaniment was a blend of parlour guitar and ragtime. They sang blues, but much of their repertoire was from the turn of the century, when blues was not yet the dominant black music, and included ballads, medicine show material, and coon songs; their harmony singing, too, was of an earlier age. Long Cleve Reed may also have been Big Boy Cleveland, who recorded shortly after Hull and Reed, playing a slide guitar blues and ‘Quill Blues’, a fife solo unparalleled on commercial race records.