![]() “If it wasn’t for Chet Atkins there’d be no Jerry Reed,” he explained in one interview. In 1961 Reed moved to Nashville and eventually had a stroke of good luck when a couple of his tunes, Hully Gully Guitar and Goodnight Irene, found their way to the ears of Chet Atkins, who later produced Reed's 1965 release If I Don't Live Up to It.Ītkins was Reed’s hero, but he also played an essential role in Reed’s rise to success. ![]() I mean that, I mean that with all my heart.” Later he was to commit a lot of his time to raising money for US war veterans and, as he said towards the end of his life, it was a formative period: “ I’ve been in hit movies, I’ve had hit records, I’ve written hit songs, I’ve got the ‘people’s award for the best supporting actor, - the Lord has blessed my life - but I’ll tell you right now, looking back, I’m prouder of the fact that I gave two years of my life to my country than any of that other stuff. The following year he scraped the charts with Soldier's Joy, which also coincided with him enlisting in the army for two years. In the late 1950’s Reed began to gain some attention in country and rockabilly circles, especially when in 1958 Gene Vincent covered his song Crazy Legs. At 18, he was spotted by producer Bill Lowery and cut his first disc: If the Good Lord's Willing and the Creek Don't Rise. Reed was reunited with his mother in 1944 and was soon playing guitar, writing and singing music. “I put on the grandest show you’ve ever seen on the Grand Ole Opry,” he said, “and when I got through picking they were throwing babies up in the air”. In one interview he recalls that when he was five years old he used to sit on a stove wood-pile and extract a piece of kindling to use as a guitar pick, and fantasise. I'm gonna go to Nashville and be a star," he would say from an early age. His drive and passion however were not blunted by what many would regard as a difficult start in life. While he did visit his grandparents from time to time, when his mother got into difficulties, Reed was forced to go into foster care and orphanages, where he spent most of his early years. Shortly after Jerry Reed Hubbard was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on 20 March, 1937, his parents Robert and Cynthia separated. Years later Reed described his special feelings about that moment, in his own unique way, by exclaiming: “ I was toppin' cotton, son!" Reed recalls that the guitarists in the studio were ‘straight pickers’, whereas he used an entirely different technique - and sometimes invented new methods such as that used in ‘the Claw’ – and also used to ‘tune the guitar up in all weird kinds of ways.' ![]() I almost tore the strings off that guitar!” Specifically Presley was covering Reed’s Guitar Man, but was becoming increasingly frustrated.Īs Reed tells it: “He feel in love with Guitar Man and came to Nashville to try and record it, but he kept telling the producer ‘I want it to sound like Reed’s record’, and he replied ‘well, then you gotta get Reed in here So I went there and gave him my intro and, boy, his face lit up! One of my proudest moments was sitting there watching Elvis Presley – who was the prettiest man I’ve ever seen I thought ‘I’ve been born wrong, there’s something wrong’ - singing my song. One proof of that came in 1967 when Reed, who was fishing at the time, got a call from Felton Jarvis (then Elvis Presley 's producer at RCA Victor) asking him if he could come into the studio because none of the King’s session musicians could play what he wanted. Many people know Jerry Reed as Burt Reynolds’ side-kick in Smokey and the Bandit, but guitar players know him as one of the best finger-pickers who ever lived.
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