Music Came First for Jerry Reed

By Peter Cooper

Jerry Reed, country music’s howling virtuoso and a star of stage, studio and screen, has died. Reed, 71, had emphysema and was in hospice care. He leaves an unparalleled legacy of laughter and song.

By the time Reed came to popular attention as Burt Reynolds’ truck-driving sidekick “The Snowman” in the Smokey and the Bandit trilogy, he was already a musical deity to the guitar players who admired the syncopated flurries he unleashed with a casual gleam.

He was a hit recording artist by that time, having topped the early ’70s charts with When You’re Hot, You’re Hot and Lord, Mr. Ford. He had written songs for Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Porter Wagoner, Brenda Lee and others, and he had been a session guitarist for Presley, Waylon Jennings, Bobby Bare and others.

Reed enjoyed his Hollywood roles, and he often smiled when movie fans would ask for an autograph without realizing that he was a singer and guitarist of significance. Music was most important to him, though. When he was once asked which facet of music he preferred — songwriter, solo guitarist, session man or entertainer — Reed said, “Hey, that’s like trying to pick out your favorite leg.”

As Reed’s health declined in recent years, he focused on spiritual studies and veterans’ issues. “For 50 years, all I’d done was take, take, take,” he told The Tennessean in 2007. “I decided from now on it is going to be giving. And I’m way behind. We’re all way behind.”

Reed was born Jerry Reed Hubbard in Atlanta on March 20, 1937. He was the son of cotton mill workers Robert Spencer Hubbard and Cynthia Hubbard, who divorced in their son’s first year. The boy lived in orphanages and foster homes until he rejoined his mother when she married mill worker Hubert Howard in 1944. Noticing his enthusiasm for music, she bought him a used guitar for $7, and he began striking the strings with a thumb-pick, a practice he continued throughout his career.

In 1954, he played a song he had written called Aunt Meg’s Wooden Leg for Atlanta radio host Bill Lowery, who became his manager. A 30-day tour with Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours followed, and that was enough to convince Reed that high school was of little use to him. “I knew what I was going to spend my life doing,” he later said. “Nothing else made any sense.”

Peter Cooper writes daily

for The (Nashville) Tennessean. (c) Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.