![]() ![]() One year later, he won Best Country Vocal Performance, Male for “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot.” A third Grammy, this one for Best Country Instrumental Performance, came in 1993, for Sneakin’ Around, another guitar duet effort with Atkins. Reed shared a Grammy with Atkins for the instrumental album Me and Jerry in 1971. ![]() Male” (Reed played lead guitar on both Presley recordings), and his own crossover hit, the highly rhythmic “Amos Moses.” Artists ranging from Johnny Cash to Engelbert Humperdinck also cut Reed’s songs. Reed developed an instantly recognizable and idiosyncratic method of playing the guitar-called “claw style” for the shape his right hand made-that suited humor-filled compositions such as “Guitar Man,” covered by Elvis Presley along with the Reed song “U.S. Peters.” That same year, after switching to Columbia Records, Reed scored two minor pop hits: “Goodnight Irene” and “Hully Gully Guitar.” He also took jobs as a session guitarist, appearing on chart-makers by Bobby Bare and others, and wrote songs for country heavyweights including Porter Wagoner (“Misery Loves Company,” a 1962 chart-topper).Īfter signing Reed to RCA Records, Atkins told Reed simply to be himself in the studio, to let fly with his funky, down-home wit and hard-earned guitar mastery. Moving to Nashville and Working with Chet AtkinsĪfter his military discharge, Reed moved to Nashville in 1962 with his wife, Priscilla, who had her own #1 country record as Roy Drusky’s duet partner on 1965’s “Yes, Mr. While he was in the service, Brenda Lee earned a Top Ten pop hit with Reed’s composition “That’s All You Gotta Do.” Reed ended his association with Capitol in 1958 and enlisted in the U.S. However, Atlanta music publisher Bill Lowery encouraged Reed to write songs, and in 1957, rockabilly singer and labelmate Gene Vincent released a version of Reed’s “Crazy Legs” as a single. In 1955, Reed recorded his first sides for Capitol, but they failed to gain much traction. By the time he was seventeen, Reed had captured the attention of Capitol Records producer Ken Nelson. Born Jerry Reed Hubbard in Georgia, he began learning to play guitar as a boy and had appeared on shows with Faron Young and Ernest Tubb by his early teens. ![]() Reed’s electric mix of picking and grinning caught fire only after years spent paying his dues. “Because he was such a great, colorful personality with his acting and songs and entertaining, sometimes people didn’t even notice that he was just about the best guitarist you’ll ever hear.” “Every move he made was to entertain and make the world more fun,” Reed devotee Brad Paisley said after Reed’s death in 2008. During his lifetime, Reed influenced singer-guitarists such as Steve Wariner and prominent studio guitar players, including Brent Mason and even Chet Atkins, who recorded several Reed songs on his own albums and as well as two duet guitar albums with Reed. Still widely emulated as a picker, he combined complex independent lines in the guitar’s bass and treble ranges and used rippling combinations of fretted and open strings. His guitar work was marked by syncopation and complexity, while his songwriting and stage persona conveyed strutting wit and backwoods intelligence. and now that I think about it even more Chet was the only one above who used a fret board with a radius almost all the time.Jerry Reed left indelible marks as a hit recording artist, virtuoso guitarist, songwriter, and movie star. It goes with saying that in the last 70 years there have been real masters of the guitar and in that pantheon one will see Andres Segovia, Chet, Django Reinhardt and Mr. Reed may use a classic style fret board - 8 out of ten times because he found over the years it suited his style of learning, his muscle memory and hand placement of the right hand. Hence its no big leap to see that some players like Mr. (10 Radius found on Nash Style Teles are for me more comfortable to play. Reed is seen playing a classical guitar with the much flatter fret board, er well actually strictly speaking it is flat. 2) yes its very hard to play.Īnother often over looked factoid is this: many times Mr. That said I still have not worked up the desire to even try the "Claw" 1) because the tabs I've seen don not look/sound right when played slowly. Because it has been for me also on many other songs. Can not over emphasize how critical the finger placement is.
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