Jackson beginnings and Chicago blues
Jimmi Mayes began learning his trade in Jackson, Mississippi, playing drums in his high school band and working in local juke joints while still young. Early engagements with guitarist Jacob Moore introduced him to the blues shuffle in small groups that sometimes used a second guitar in place of bass. Duke Huddleston’s dance band provided another kind of experience, placing him alongside older professional players and teachers. Reading music and responding to different kinds of repertoire were part of that early training.
Mayes moved to Chicago in 1960. Red Saunders helped him find a place in the city’s musical community, and Sam Lay introduced him to Little Walter. Mayes remembered his audition as playing a shuffle with sticks on Walter’s coffee table before being sent home with an album to learn. The job brought him into contact with musicians including Robert Junior Lockwood, Earl Hooker, and the Myers brothers. He also learned from Fred Below and Lay, two drummers whose work was central to electric Chicago blues.
New York, the Starliters, and Hendrix
Work with singer Tommy Hunt took Mayes to New York and into a different professional circuit. He performed with R&B and soul artists, including Marvin Gaye and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and traveled in the world of package shows and the Motown Revue. The demands differed from a neighborhood blues club: shorter sets, changing singers, repeated shows, and the need to be ready with several kinds of music. His drumming career expanded through those practical assignments.
As a member and bandleader with Joey Dee and the Starliters, Mayes became a friend and musical associate of Jimi Hendrix before Hendrix’s international breakthrough. Mayes helped bring the guitarist into the Starliters in 1965. Their time together involved traveling and sharing the working life of a band, an experience Mayes later described in his memoir. It was one chapter of a career that moved among blues, the twist, soul, and rock rather than a permanent move away from his earlier music.
Their association also produced a lasting recording credit. On March 13, 1968, Mayes played drums on Hendrix’s ‘My Friend’ at Sound Center Studios in New York. The session included Ken Pine, Paul Caruso, and Stephen Stills. The song appeared after Hendrix’s death on The Cry of Love in 1971. The release history carried a performance made by old acquaintances into the catalog of a musician whose fame had grown enormously since their touring days together.
Leading groups and returning to Chicago
Mayes developed his own bands alongside the sideman work. Jimmi Mayes and the Soul Breed released ‘Drums for Sale’ with ‘Pluckin’’ on Jubilee in the 1960s. A later extended engagement in Mexico City added another setting to his performing life before he returned to Chicago in 1972. He continued working with singers and leading groups, drawing on experience acquired in several cities and several different branches of popular music.
Jimmy Reed was one of the important musicians he backed after returning. Mayes played with Reed at the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, in a band that included Lacy Gibson. His own group, the Mill Street Depo, took its name from the railway station area at Capitol and Mill in Jackson. It gave him a continuing band identity alongside engagements with other artists. Later recordings under his own name included Messin’ with the Kid in 2004 and All My Best, released by Wolf Records in 2012.
In 2009–2011, Mayes worked in Willie ‘Big Eyes’ Smith’s band, backing musicians including Pinetop Perkins and Hubert Sumlin. Smith’s own command of the shuffle made that relationship especially meaningful. Mayes could provide the drums while Smith played harmonica, extending a rhythm approach both men valued. The work connected him again with Chicago veterans, now after decades of his own experience supporting bands and singers.
Telling the sideman’s story
The Amazing Jimmi Mayes: Sideman to the Stars, written with V. C. Speek and published by University Press of Mississippi, brought his life into book form. Its story moves through Mississippi juke joints, Chicago blues clubs, New York soul and rock work, and the realities of making a living on the road. The Delta Blues Museum featured the book in 2014, placing Mayes’s account within a broader history of American music rather than treating it only as a collection of celebrity encounters.
The memoir gives particular weight to the position from which Mayes experienced those changes: behind the drum set. He was close enough to singers and bandleaders to observe rehearsals, touring routines, and changes in musical fashion while remaining responsible for a supporting part. His story also follows the difficulties and interruptions of a working career. The book’s perspective complements the records, making visible some of the labor and experience behind a sideman’s credits.
Public appearances after the book included talks and performances connected with Mississippi cultural institutions and music events. His official biography lists B.B. King Day programs at Mississippi Valley State University and the B.B. King Museum, along with a History Is Lunch appearance discussing the memoir. Those settings gave him a role as a speaker about musical life as well as a performer, passing on recollections gained across different professional circuits.
A singer and drummer back in Mississippi
Mayes returned to Jackson in late 2015. With Carol and Ron Marble’s support, he developed a new recording project that gave his singing a more prominent role. My Whole Life’s a Shuffle, released in July 2018 by Mississippi Delta Records, was recorded at the Dr. Riley B. King Recording Studio at Mississippi Valley State University. Alphonso Sanders and Jimmie Lee Jr. produced, with Kern Pratt involved in the arrangements and guitar work.
Mayes sings and plays drums across the album, with Mickey Rogers, James Evans, Sanders, Pratt, and Jimmie Lee Jr. among the contributors. ‘Dreaming of a Blues Train,’ ‘That Woman and My Wife,’ ‘Stay Gone,’ and ‘The Jimmies’ place his own voice at the center of the record. Several songs carry his writing credit, sometimes shared with Carol Marble or other collaborators. The title brings his best-known rhythmic skill into the language of a life story.
His later catalog includes The Mailman Has a Mailman Too and a Jimmy Reed live release listed in 2024. Across these projects, he remains both an accompanist and a leader. The shuffle links the early juke-joint drummer to the later singer: a particular feel developed through years of work, carried into songs presented in his own name as well as into performances behind other musicians.