In September 1967, Elvis Presley came to RCA Studio B in Nashville with a song he couldn’t stop thinking about. It was “Guitar Man,” written and recorded earlier that year by a fast-talking Georgia picker named Jerry Reed.
Jerry Reed’s version had not been a big hit. It stalled at No. 53 on the Billboard country chart. But Elvis Presley had heard it on the radio, and he didn’t just want to cover it. He wanted his record to sound like Jerry Reed’s.
That turned out to be the hard part.
A Room Full of Great Guitar Players
The musicians in Studio B that day were some of the best in the business. Scotty Moore, the guitarist on Elvis Presley’s earliest records, was there. So were Chip Young, Harold Bradley and Charlie McCoy. These men played on hit records every week.
They worked on “Guitar Man” and still couldn’t get that sound. Something about Jerry Reed’s record just wouldn’t come out of their guitars.
Producer Felton Jarvis, an old friend of Jerry Reed’s from Atlanta, figured out what was missing: the man who wrote the song. So he went looking for him. Jerry Reed was out fishing on the Cumberland River.
“Straight Pickers”
Years later, Jerry Reed remembered what he told Felton Jarvis that day. If Elvis Presley wanted it to sound like the record, they would have to get Jerry Reed in there to play guitar. The studio men were “straight pickers,” he said, and he played a different way.
“I pick with my fingers and tune that guitar up all weird kind of ways.”
That was the whole secret. Jerry Reed didn’t play with a flat pick. He used a thumb pick and his fingers, in a style that came to be called “the claw” because of the shape his right hand made. He also liked unusual tunings and played a nylon-string guitar, which is not the usual sound in a Nashville session. You could have the best players in town learn every note and it still wouldn’t sound like him, because the sound came from the way he played.
Felton Jarvis later said Jerry Reed walked in looking like “a sure-enough Alabama wild man.” He was unshaven and still dressed for the river. Jerry Reed picked up the nylon-string guitar and hit the intro. He remembered Elvis Presley’s face lighting up the moment he heard it. Asked about it decades later, Jerry Reed said he wasn’t nervous at all. He’d only have been nervous, he explained, if they’d asked him to do something he didn’t know how to do.
The Part of the Story Most People Don’t Know
Jerry Reed played on “Guitar Man,” then on a second song, “Big Boss Man.” Then the business side of Elvis Presley’s world showed up.
For years, songs recorded by Elvis Presley were expected to come with a piece of the publishing. Hill and Range, the publishing company tied to Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker, had a long-standing arrangement to split publishing on Elvis Presley’s songs. Writers who wanted the King to record their songs were usually pressured to give up a share.
Freddy Bienstock, who handled song publishing for Elvis Presley, asked Jerry Reed to give up the publishing on “Guitar Man.”
Jerry Reed walked out of the session.
According to the official Elvis Presley music site, he told Freddy Bienstock plainly:
“You don’t need the money, and Elvis don’t need the money.”
He added that he was making more money than he could spend, and suggested they just forget the song had ever been recorded.
How It Ended
It’s often retold as a story where Jerry Reed kept everything. The truth is a little different. In the end, Jerry Reed agreed to give Freddy Bienstock a cut on Elvis Presley’s version of the song only. Jerry Reed’s own song stayed his. For a young writer facing the most powerful operation in popular music, that was a remarkable result.
It didn’t hurt the friendship, either. Elvis Presley released “Guitar Man” in January 1968. That same month, on January 16, 1968, he was back in Studio B recording another Jerry Reed song, “U.S. Male.”
The Song That Kept Coming Back
“Guitar Man” had one more chapter. After Elvis Presley’s death, Felton Jarvis produced a new version of the recording, and Jerry Reed came back to play on it. Released in 1981, it went all the way to No. 1 on the country chart. The song that once stalled at No. 53 became a No. 1 record, and it still had Jerry Reed’s guitar on it.
Jerry Reed never made much of his own talent. Years later, he joked that he never thought his playing was anything special, “until everybody told me how weird my pickin’ was.”
He was right about that. Nobody else played that way, which is why Elvis Presley had to send someone down to the river to find him.