Background and career
Jerry Reed Hubbard (March 20, 1937 – September 1, 2008), known professionally as Jerry Reed, was an American country singer, guitarist, composer, songwriter, and actor who appeared in more than a dozen films. His signature songs included "Guitar Man", "U.S. Male", "A Thing Called Love", "Alabama Wild Man", "Amos Moses", "When You're Hot, You're Hot" (which garnered a Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance), "Ko-Ko Joe", "Lord, Mr. Ford", "East Bound and Down" (the theme song for the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit, in which Reed co-starred), "The Bird", and "She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft)". Reed was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum. He was announced as an inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame in April 2017, and he was officially inducted by Bobby Bare on October 24.
Reed was born in Atlanta and was the second child of Robert and Cynthia Hubbard. Reed's grandparents lived in Rockmart and he visited them from time to time. As a small child running around strumming his guitar, he is quoted as saying, "I am gonna be a star. I'm gonna go to Nashville and be a star." Reed's parents separated four months after his birth. He and his sister spent seven years in foster homes or orphanages growing up. Reed was reunited with his mother and stepfather in 1944. Reed graduated from O'Keefe High School, an Atlanta city school. The O'Keefe building still exists today; it was sold to Georgia Tech and is now part of the university's campus. By high school, Reed was already writing and singing music, having learned to play the guitar as a child. At age 18, he was signed by publisher and record producer Bill Lowery to cut his first record, "If the Good Lord's Willing and the Creek Don't Rise". At Capitol Records, Reed was promoted as a new "teenage sensation" after recording his own rockabilly composition, "When I Found You", in 1956. He recorded both country and rockabilly singles and found success as a songwriter when labelmate Gene Vincent covered his song "Crazy Legs" in 1958. By 1958, Bill Lowery signed Reed to his company, National Recording Corporation. He recorded for NRC as both an artist and as a member of the staff band, which included Joe South and Ray Stevens, other NRC artists. Reed married Priscilla "Prissy" Mitchell in 1959. They had two daughters, one born in 1960 and the other in 1970. Mitchell was a member of folk group the Appalachians ("Bony Moronie", 1963), and with Roy Drusky was co-credited on the 1965 country number-one hit "Yes, Mr. Peters".
In 1959, Reed hit the Billboard "Bubbling Under the Top 100", also known as the Roar, and the Cashbox country chart with the single "Soldier's Joy". After serving two years in the U.S. Army, Reed moved to Nashville in 1961 to continue his songwriting career, which had continued to gather steam while he was in the Army, thanks to Brenda Lee's 1960 cover of his song "That's All You Got to Do". He also became a popular session and tour guitarist. In 1962, he scored some success with two singles "Goodnight Irene" (as by Jerry Reed and the Hully Girlies, featuring a female vocal group) and "Hully Gully Guitar", which found their way to Chet Atkins at RCA Victor, who produced Reed's 1965 "If I Don't Live Up to It".
In July 1967, Reed had his best showing on the country chart (number 53) with his self-penned "Guitar Man", which Elvis Presley soon covered. Reed's next single was "Tupelo Mississippi Flash", a comic tribute to Presley. Recorded on September 1, the song became his first top-20 hit, going to number 15 on the chart. Coincidentally, Presley came to Nashville to record nine days later, and one of the songs he became especially excited about was "Guitar Man". Reed recalled how he was tracked down to play on the Presley session: "I was out on the Cumberland River fishing, and I got a call from Felton Jarvis (then Presley's producer at RCA Victor). He said, 'Elvis is down here. We've been trying to cut "Guitar Man" all day long. He wants it to sound like it sounded on your album.' I finally told him, 'Well, if you want it to sound like that, you're going have to get me in there to play guitar, because these guys [you're using in the studio] are straight pickers. I pick with my fingers and tune that guitar up all weird kind of ways.'" Jarvis hired Reed to play on the session. "I hit that intro, and [Elvis's] face lit up and here we went. Then after he got through that, he cut [my] "U.S. Male" at the same session. I was toppin' cotton, son." Reed also played the guitar for Elvis Presley's "Big Boss Man" (1967), recorded in the same session. On January 15 and 16, 1968, Reed worked on a second Presley session, during which he played guitar on a cover of Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business", "Stay Away", and "Goin' Home" (two songs revolving around Presley's film Stay Away, Joe), as well as another Reed composition, "U.S. Male" (Reed's quoted recollection of "U.S. Male" being recorded at the same session as "Guitar Man" being incorrect). Presley also recorded two other Reed compositions: "A Thing Called Love" in May 1971 for his He Touched Me album, and "Talk About The Good Times" in December 1973, for a total of four. Johnny Cash also released "A Thing Called Love" as a single in 1971. It reached number two on the Billboard Country Singles Chart for North America, and was also successful in Europe. It became the title track for a studio album, A Thing Called Love, that he released the following spring.
After releasing the 1970 crossover hit "Amos Moses", a hybrid of rock, country, funk, and Cajun styles which reached number eight on the U.S. pop chart, Reed teamed with Atkins for the duet LP Me & Jerry, which earned the pair the Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance. During the 1970 television season, he was a regular on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and in 1971, he released his biggest hit, the chart-topper "When You're Hot, You're Hot", which is a story song with most of the lyrics spoken rather than sung. The lyric describes the narrator's near success at shooting dice, a police raid, and a judge who is supposedly a fishing buddy of the singer, who nevertheless sends him up the river for gambling. Aside from being a major crossover hit, "When You're Hot, You're Hot" earned Reed the Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Performance, Male. "When You're Hot, You're Hot" was the title track of Reed's eighth solo album, reaching number 9 Pop and number six on Billboard's Easy Listening chart. The singles from the album, "Amos Moses" and "When You're Hot, You're Hot", sold over one million copies, and were awarded gold discs by the RIAA. The album features songs such as Reed's version of "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town" and John D. Loudermilk's free-wheeling song "Big Daddy (Alabama Bound)".
A second collaboration with Atkins, Me & Chet, followed in 1972, as did a series of top-40 singles, which alternated between frenetic, straightforward country offerings and more pop-flavored, countrypolitan material. A year later, he scored his second number-one single with "Lord, Mr. Ford" (written by Deena Kaye Rose), from the album of the same name. Atkins, who frequently produced Reed's music, remarked that he had to encourage Reed to put instrumental numbers on his own albums, as Reed always considered himself more of a songwriter than a player. Atkins, however, thought Reed was a better fingerstyle player than he was himself; Reed, according to Atkins, helped him work out the fingerpicking for one of Atkins's biggest hits, "Yakety Axe". Reed was featured in animated form in a December 9, 1972, episode of Hanna–Barbera's The New Scooby-Doo Movies, "The Phantom of the Country Music Hall" (prod. No. 61-10). He sang and played the song "Pretty Mary Sunlight". The song is played throughout the episode as Scooby and the gang search for Reed's missing guitar. In the mid-1970s, Reed's recording career began to take a back seat to his acting aspirations. In 1974, he co-starred with his close friend Burt Reynolds in the film W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings. While he continued to record throughout the decade, his greatest visibility was as a motion picture star and almost always in tandem with headliner Reynolds, after 1976's Gator. In 1977 he co-starred with Claude Akins in the CBS cop show Nashville 99 and also wrote and performed the theme song. It was cancelled after only four episodes, freeing him up to co-star with Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. His song for the movie, "East Bound and Down," landed Reed a number-two hit. He went on to co-star in all three of the Smokey and the Bandit films. Also in 1977, Reed joined entrepreneur Larry Schmittou and other country music stars, including Conway Twitty, Cal Smith, Larry Gatlin, and Richard Sterban, as investors in the Nashville Sounds, a minor league baseball team of the Double-A Southern League that began play in 1978. Reed appeared in 1978's High-Ballin' and 1979's Hot Stuff and made two guest appearances on the sitcom Alice in 1978 and 1981. Reed also hosted a TV variety show, filming two episodes of The Jerry Reed Show in 1976. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band released a version of "Amos Moses" in 1976. In 1979, he released a record comprising both vocal and instrumental selections titled, appropriately enough, Half & Half. It was followed one year later by Jerry Reed Sings Jim Croce, a tribute to the late singer/songwriter. He also starred in a TV movie in that year entitled Concrete Cowboys.
