By the summer of 2008, Jerry Reed could no longer play the guitar. Emphysema had worn his lungs down, and the man who once made a guitar sound like three players at once had to set it aside. According to Peter Cooper’s obituary in The Tennessean, that was his only regret about the instrument: his health simply would not let him play it anymore.
Music would have been a comfort in those final months. Instead, the comfort came from people. Jerry spent his time with his family and with old friends who kept coming by, Brenda Lee and Bobby Bare among them. They told stories. They told jokes. And sometimes Jerry laughed so hard that he had to stop, try to be serious for a moment, and catch his fragile breath before he could go on.
What the Guitar Had Meant
To understand why that regret ran so deep, you have to remember what Jerry Reed did with six strings. His “claw” style used nearly his whole right hand to pick, and it was so unusual that when Elvis Presley wanted “Guitar Man” to sound like Jerry’s record in 1967, the session players couldn’t copy it. Jerry had to come in and play it himself.
Brent Mason, the Nashville session guitarist heard on records by Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn and many more, called Jerry Reed his favorite guitar player of all time. Mason put it plainly when Jerry died:
“I’ve been stealing from Jerry Reed for years.”
The Friends Who Kept Coming
Brenda Lee went back with Jerry nearly fifty years. In 1960, she took his song “That’s All You Gotta Do” into the pop Top 10. When he died, she remembered him not as the wisecracking Snowman from Smokey and the Bandit, but as “a gentle, kind, sweet family man.”
Bobby Bare knew that side of him too. The two had spent hundreds of hours fishing together on quiet lakes around Nashville. Bare said the only wild thing about the “Alabama Wild Man” was his stage act. Off stage, Bare said, Jerry was the opposite.
A Turn Toward Giving
As his health declined, Jerry Reed turned his attention to spiritual study and to veterans’ causes. In 2007 he told The Tennessean‘s Tim Ghianni that he had spent fifty years taking, and had decided the rest of his life would be about giving.
His final project was an album called The Gallant Few, made to raise money for wounded veterans. He was especially proud of it. His longtime booking agent, Carrie Moore-Reed, said he kept recording right up until he couldn’t anymore.
“Every Dream I Ever Dreamed Came True”
On a day in August 2008, Jerry Reed told Bobby Bare something he had been thinking about a lot: everything he had ever dreamed had come true. And he was at peace with that.
He had said nearly the same thing to CMT in 2005, looking back on a life that started in Georgia orphanages and foster homes and carried him to Nashville and Hollywood:
“I’m a cotton mill boy, and I got to go to Hollywood. Can you imagine that?”
Jerry Reed died in hospice care in Nashville on September 1, 2008. He was 71.
Nine years later, when the Country Music Hall of Fame finally inducted him, the man who stood up to welcome him in was his old fishing buddy, Bobby Bare.