Jerry Reed, That Swinging Guitar Man

Why Reed was far more than just an Alabama Wild Man

Welcome music lovers to a new edition of ‘Listening Sessions’!

Ever since I was a kid, I have been fascinated by Jerry Reed; first, through Elvis Presley’s covers of talking blues like ‘Guitar Man’ and ‘U.S. Male’ as well as the beautiful ‘A Thing Called Love’ and then through Reed himself, especially his outrageous hits, ‘Amos Moses’ and ‘When You’re Hot, You’re Hot.’ These recordings are so over the top it’s easy to see Reed as the ultimate Southerner: coarse, untamed and unapologetic. Instead, Reed was one of the most potent and gifted artists in Nashville from the late sixties onwards. He was a triple threat: a fearsome guitar player, a writer who could write songs that hit the heart, the head and the funny bone, and a gifted singer.

The below essay really only scratches the surface, concentrating on his music from about 1967 to 1971 but I hope it argues that Reed was a deeply talented and important artist. As always, I would love to know what you think. Drop a comment by clicking below.

Coming soon will be my first paid post, covering most of the music I saw while in New York in mid-October as well as a brief report on some of what I have been listening to recently and how my Substack is doing. Most of the report on New York will be available for all, but if you want to read the whole thing, I hope you may consider becoming a paid subscriber. If money is tight, I would be pleased to comp you a paid subscription. Just let me know by email - no questions asked. We’re all in this together.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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When I got married, the one thing I wanted to do above anything else was to be in charge of the music for me and my wife’s reception. That did not mean creating a playlist on Spotify, hooking up a phone to our reception hall’s sound system and then pressing play. It instead meant spending months sequencing and then refining over and over again the three hours of music that would be played. It also meant laying out information about each selection in a document that would be printed and made available to any guest interested enough to know what they were about to listen to. It additionally meant—and this was the most work of all—burning the fifty song choices onto three CDs, fairly easy to do with what I had on CD, more complicated with what needed to be transferred from vinyl.

That meant a carrying a collection of LPs by public transportation to my parents’ home so I could use their portable Crosley system which can record vinyl onto CD.

Each song I chose was done with care. There were several ground rules. Save for Frank Sinatra, who opened and closed the playlist, no artist could appear more than once. The playlist had to be as eclectic as possible, spanning rock, pop, soul, folk, big band, jazz and classical. It would also avoid any obvious choices (for one example, for Elvis Presley, I choose ‘Angel,’ a beautiful ballad from the Follow That Dream soundtrack as opposed to, say, ‘Love Me Tender’ or ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love.’).

There was one song I knew I had to include. It was a song I had known for almost all of my life. It tells a story of a man “six foot six” who “weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds” and was “brought down to his knees by love,” according to the song’s narrator. As for that individual? He is more like you or I, full of “struggle and doubt” and “too busy with living to worry about / a thing called love.” And about this ‘A Thing Called Love’? Well, you “can’t see it with your eyes / or hold it with your hand / but like the wind, it covers our land.”

Among those who recorded ‘A Thing Called Love’ was Presley in 1971 for his third and final sacred album, He Touched Me. That’s how I first got to know the song. For the wedding playlist, I selected the original version. After playing it from vinyl and getting it onto CD, my father asked who was singing. I replied, “Jerry Reed.” My dad paused and then said, “that doesn’t sound like Jerry Reed to me.”

‘A Thing Called Love’ was released on Reed’s second album for RCA, Nashville Underground, released in early 1968. It features a typically intricate part for acoustic guitar which Reed plays with aplomb. There’s a nice string arrangement and understated backing by some of Nashville’s finest. Reed’s vocal showcases his gifts as a singer: a rich tone, a thick timbre, exquisite phrasing. It is a beautiful, heartfelt recording. Not exactly the adjectives that come to mind when thinking of Jerry Reed.

Think of another song portrait of a man. This time, instead of being “six foot six,” this guy is “named after a man of the cloth” and someone “who could eat up his weight in groceries.” ‘Amos Moses’ is everything that ‘A Thing Called Love’ isn’t.

It’s outrageous, over-the-top and burnished with Southern iconography: the nitwit sheriff, an alligator that feasts on Amos’ left arm “clean up to the elbow” and a celebration of the triumph of the individual over society. The song is also infectious and funky. Swampier than Creedence Clearwater Revival or even Tony Joe White. Sillier than Buck Owens. Funnier than Roger Miller. Reed took it to the extreme and in doing so, got himself a hit in the winter of 1971. He became a household name but those in the know already knew that Jerry Reed was something else.

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Like many of his contemporaries, Reed lurked around the margins before finally getting his shot. He cut his first record at 18 in 1955 in Atlanta, where he was born. Several other 45s followed, including a few that reached Billboard’s “Bubbling Under” chart. He got song credits on albums by Johnny Cash and Gene Vincent. After two years in the US Army, he went to Nashville, continuing to get his songs recorded as well as becoming known as a formidable picker in a town full of them. One of them, Chet Atkins, took notice and Reed landed on RCA.

His first single for the label to get onto the Billboard Country chart was ‘Guitar Man’ (Reed had already topped the chart as a songwriter with Porter Wagoner’s recording of his ‘Misery Loves Company’), a talking-blues reframing of the rags-to-riches American tale of Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ that put Reed front-and-centre as a triple threat: a singing wordsmith who played a mean guitar. One person whose head was turned by what he heard was Elvis Presley.

Covering ‘Guitar Man’ was Presley’s first order of business for his session in Nashville in September 1967. There was an immediate problem. None of the guitarists on the session: Chip Young, Harold Bradley and Scotty Moore could play the song’s opening lick well. The solution was to get Reed down to Studio B to do it himself.

“Lord, have mercy, what is that?” is what Presley is reported to have said when Reed arrived at the studio straight from fishing, unshaved and wearing an old pair of boots. Before the first take, Reed drawled, “I haven’t played all weekend, Elvis” to which producer Felton Jarvis added, “I know Reed, your house is a mess.”

It took Reed a few tries to get his part just right and then he was off. By the 12th take, things had gelled marvelously, the feeling so infectious that a coda riffing on ‘What’d I Say’ had become part of the arrangement. He stuck around for Presley’s cover of ‘Big Boss Man’ and then when Freddy Bienstock, who handled Presley’s publishing on behalf of Col. Tom Parker, tried to push Reed into signing the standard publishing deal that other songwriters had to ink when their songs were covered by the singer, Reed told Bienstock to stick it.

Even as Presley’s cover of ‘Guitar Man’ wasn’t a hit, it was another sign, for those taking notice, that an artistic renaissance was underway. The song’s tale of an axe man ditching his job at a car wash to seek the American Dream, embarking on an odyssey that goes from Kingston, New York to Memphis to Macon to Panama City, ending in Mobile and a club called Big Jack’s, would fuel Presley’s NBC special of 1968, appearing in the opening medley and an extended production number later on, both instances acting as a kind of analogy of his own rise in the mid fifties from an electrician to The Hillbilly Cat.

Reed’s version of ‘Guitar Man’ anchored his first LP for RCA, The Unbelievable Guitar & Voice of Jerry Reed. It would be labelled a country album but like much of what was being made in Music City at the time, calling it country doesn’t really capture its sound or explain what Reed was trying to do. While he worked within the confines of the Nashville Sound, the end result was not a distilled form of country music, it wasn’t really country music at all.

As Reed told Peter Guralnick for Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, “I never thought of myself as a Nashville recording musician. ’Cause I was a stylist. I [could] only play my stuff. And I wasn’t worth a damn playing that other stuff.” The stuff that got on his album was partly urbane country—‘Long Gone’ would soon be covered by Waylon Jennings—but more often not. There’s a Ray Charles feel to ‘Woman Shy,’ sly humour on ‘Take a Walk’ and ‘Love Man’ and a thorough demonstration of his chops on ‘The Claw.’ ‘U.S. Male’ was another talking blues that caught Presley’s ear. And then there was the baroque pop of ‘It Don’t Work That Way’ and ‘You’re Young.’ It all set the stage for Nashville Underground, his follow-up LP.

Here is where Reed fully asserted himself as a multi-faceted, essentially uncategorizable, musician. What is a constant is his guitar, often relentless in its rhythm but cleanly articulated. It provides the momentum for the lament of ‘You’ve Been Crying Again’ and the low-key blues of ‘Almost Crazy.’ It is the engine as well for the purely pop moments of the album, all included on Nashville Underground’s first side.

Reed’s strumming rings out on the album opener, ‘Remembering.’ A saloon song in that regret over a long gone away is its preoccupation (it also takes places in a bar), it is Reed at his most straight-edged. It is also Reed at his most poetic—mull these lines over, “the fool I’ve been / the hurt I’ve caused / the good woman that I loved and lost / for she’s constantly in my memory.” A clavinet riff that is returned to over and over again adds to the polish.

It is a gloss that isn’t a tempering of Reed’s spirit. It’s part of who he was. Around the time that Nashville Underground was released, he was among the session musicians recruited for Ian & Sylvia’s Nashville, their very successful foray into Tennessee. Reed takes the electric lead on ‘Farewell to the North,’ a performance that is stirring in its assuredness but also in how each string of Reed’s instrument rings out. The timbre is pristine, the tone calls to mind the taste of a jazz player. It’s that good.

Good too is the rest of Nashville Underground’s pop side: ‘You Wouldn’t Know a Good Time’ and ‘Save Your Dreams.’ Both have a pulse that pushes. It is a danceable one but also has a bite. On both, Reed is a vocal stylist, communicating with craft and sincerity.

The album doesn’t shortchange the other side of Reed. Side two begins with the acoustic porch beat of ‘Fine on My Mind.’ It also has a loose interpretation of Charles’ ‘Halleluiah, I Love Her So.’ After tapping on his guitar in the middle of the line, “she comes knockin’ on my door,” Reed quips, “my baby’s a long knocker.”

Versions of standbys ‘Wabash Cannonball’ and ‘John Henry’ are cosmopolitan and maybe even a little antiseptic. There is no such concern for ‘Tupelo Mississippi Flash.’ Here, Reed is at full tilt with another of his patented talking blues. Reed’s singing about Presley here, using the melody of ‘All American Boy,’ a hit for Bobby Bare (credited to Bill Parsons) in 1958 and also about Presley.

Over the song’s two-minute and forty-five seconds, it’s as if the brashest part of Reed’s personality—his id, if you like—is being born. The tune’s foundation is a delta-rich riff, every undulation exaggerated. Reed’s voice loses all inhibition—hear the sharpness as he pronounces “Beauregard Rippy” and how broadly he sings “I got talent boy” and “the boy’s squirrely.”

When he gets to the punchline—the song is about a talent-scout employee who tells his boss to pass on this bizarre Rippy only to see him make it big and himself out of a job—he unleashes it with the exuberance of a stand-up comedian. “I got a new job now and I’m learnin’ real fast,” he sings before the band drops out and it’s only Reed and his guitar, “I’m a’drivin’ the bus for the Tupelo Mississippi Flash.” He continues as the band returns, “And his Cadillac, I’m driving that too / and that yacht he’s got / and his airplane.” That’s all warm-up for the kicker, “well, chauffeur chaugood, that’s what I always say.”

On his next album, Alabama Wild Man, Reed was even more amped up. The title track, a carbon copy of ‘Tupelo Mississippi Flash,’ has Reed turning his focus onto himself. The voice is even more unbridled, the humour even more biting as his father, realizing he’s got a gold mine for a son, becomes his biggest fan. While Reed still explored his sensibilities as a pop singer and songwriter—’Thank You Girl’ from When You’re Hot, You’re Hot could have been a big hit—his wild side took precedence, shunting aside everything else.

Reed could be fervently funky like on ‘Gomyeyonyu’ from Cookin’ or ridiculously ribald as on his cover ‘Plastic Saddle,’ glorifying in multiple double entendres.

Following ‘Amos Moses’ was his second and last song to break through to the Billboard Hot 100. ‘When You’re Hot, You’re Hot’ is powered by a swaggering riff on electric guitar. The tale the song tells revels in the rambling side of life: crap games in the alley, getting busted by the cops, trying to bribe a judge, finding oneself in deep trouble as your friends walk away. There is no sugarcoating of the song’s theme: life is about trying to beat the house. The song was so popular that the title entered popular lexicon. It’s fitting for Jerry Reed: at his zaniest, he struck a deep chord. He knew more than just a thing or two about life.

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