In 2004, Jerry Reed was in his late 60s and had written a new song he wanted to record. He had a particular way he wanted to do it. He wanted to sing it for a real audience, not in a studio. So he took his touring band to a concert in Parsons, Kansas, a small town in the southeast corner of the state, and his son-in-law, Chet Hinesley, set up to record it.
Hinesley did not stop at the new song. He decided to tape the entire show. That night became Jerry Reed’s last live album.
A Song About Getting Old
The new song was called “Father Time and Gravity.” One interviewer who heard it the next year described it as a funny song about aging, which was exactly the kind of song Jerry Reed had always written. He had spent his career turning trouble into a punch line, from a swamp man in “Amos Moses” to a divorce settlement in “She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft).” Now the subject was his own body, and he was still finding the joke in it.
He was not the man fans remembered from the late 1970s, riding next to Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. He had had quadruple bypass surgery in June 1999. Through the late 1990s he had kept up a pace of about 80 shows a year, but by 2004 the road was close to finished for him. In a July 2005 interview, the writer noted that Reed had officially retired from touring the year before. Reed answered that he was in the studio now, and that when he said “retired,” who knew what that really meant.
The Band on Stage That Night
The people behind him in Parsons were not hired strangers. Guitarist Bobby Lovett had been with him for 21 years. Mark Thornton had played with him for about eight. On keyboards and rhythm guitar was “Ms. Pris,” his wife, Priscilla Mitchell, who had been a recording artist in her own right in the 1960s. She had been traveling with him for about twelve years, and Reed told the interviewer plainly that he could not do the shows without her.
Years later, Mark Thornton put together a YouTube playlist of the album, with the band’s names listed in its description.
What the Tape Caught
The show opened with “Guitar Man,” the song that had changed his life in 1967. On the recording, Reed stops to tell the story of the session where Elvis Presley cut it. Elvis’s people could not get the guitar part right without him, so producer Felton Jarvis called Reed in to play it himself. Talking about it in 2005, Reed said he had not been nervous, because he already knew exactly how to play it. It was his own lick.
“Father Time and Gravity” came second. From there the set ran through the hits his audience came for: “Amos Moses,” “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” “She Got the Goldmine,” and “East Bound and Down,” the song he sang as the Snowman.
He did not try to carry every guitar part alone. One reviewer noted that Reed shared the guitar work with his band mates, but still showed real skill on “Jerry’s Breakdown Revisited,” a new take on the instrumental he had recorded with his mentor Chet Atkins decades earlier. The same reviewer was honest about his voice: the years could be heard on it. What had not faded was the humor that had always won over his crowds.
When the interviewer brought up the album the following summer, Reed did not talk about his voice or his age. He talked about the night itself.
It was one of those magical nights.
“Live, Still!”
The album came out on April 19, 2005, on R2K Records, the small label run by his family. The title was a joke of its own. He was still alive, and still live.
That same day, BMI threw a release party for him at its office in Nashville. Reed rarely went out by then, but that day he was the center of the room, surrounded by old friends including Bobby Bare, Chip Young and Jerry Kennedy. BMI gave him a Special Citation of Appreciation for his work as a songwriter, performer and actor.
In that summer interview he sounded content. He said he had spent the previous evening out on a lake and caught a couple of bass, and that his life felt full. He was finishing two more albums in the studio, and he said the movie work was behind him. From then on, he told the interviewer, it would be music.
The Last Years
He kept that promise for as long as he could. More records followed on the family label, including “Let’s Git It On” in 2006, “Christmas at the Mall” in 2007 and “The Gallant Few” in 2008.
Emphysema took him at the start of September 2008, in hospice care in Nashville. He was 71. About four years earlier, he had stood in front of a Kansas crowd and sung about Father Time and gravity.
Most obituaries led with the grin, the truck and the Bandit movies. But Jerry Reed had once said what he was proudest of, and it was not any of that.
I’m proud that I played guitar and was accepted by musicians and guitar players.
In 2017, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Bobby Bare, one of the friends at that 2005 album party, was the one who inducted him.