b. June 15, 1880 in Floyd County, VA, d. January 17, 1956 in Elgood, WV, folk, country, and old-time musician and singer-songwriter. He was one of the artists who recorded at the Bristol Sessions in 1927, alongside more famous names such as Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family. He played the fiddle along with his son Arville, who played the guitar.
Alfred was born completely blind, in Floyd County, Virginia, being the second blind child born to Riley & Charlotte (Akers) Reed. He was raised in a very conservative family, the son of a farm laborer, and he acquired a violin at a young age. Later, he began performing at county fairs, in country schoolhouses, for political rallies, and in churches. He even played on street corners for tips. He used to sell out printed copies of his compositions for ten cents each. This is about all the information that can be gathered from him in his early life, as most of the events during this time were not written down nor talked about much in his later years. While playing during a convention in 1927, Ralph Peer, who was the director of Bristol Sessions, heard Reed playing "The Wreck of the Virginian", and asked him if he wanted to make some recordings. Reed consented, and he recorded four songs, one solo, "The Wreck of the Virginian", and three with Arville's guitar accompaniment: "I Mean to Live for Jesus", "You Must Unload", and "Walking in the Way with Jesus". After the Bristol Sessions, Reed kept recording until 1929, which was the year of his most famous song's release "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?". After 1929, he stopped recording and lived out the rest of his life mostly in the Princeton area in Mercer County, West Virginia. Reed continued to perform locally until 1937 when a statute was passed prohibiting blind street musicians. In addition to being recording artist and a musician, he also served as a lay preacher Methodist church minister.
In 1956, Reed died, supposedly of starvation. He is buried in Elgood, West Virginia.
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By Mark A. Humphrey
This West Virginia singer/songwriter and fiddler was one of Ralph Peer's discoveries on the legendary 1927 Bristol field trip that unearthed both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. Reed was one of those uniquely Southern contradictions, both reactionary and progressive in his songs. "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" echoed the sentiments of the rural poor (who tasted none of the Roaring Twenties prosperity), while "Why Do You Bob Your Hair, Girls?" invoked Biblical sanctions against flappers. Topical commentary of this sort was rare in early hillbilly recordings: Reed's contemporaries usually pruned a branch from the folk tree or swiped a page from Mom's Victorian songbook. Incongruously, Reed was a protest singer/songwriter out of time and place. Ry Cooder revived a couple of his songs in the '70s, the decade of Rounder's reissue of several Reed performances, How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?