Rest in peace (if that's possible), Jerry Reed. With Chet Atkins. Two master finger-pickers, one using thumb and two fingers (Chet) and one using thumb and three (Jerry).
Chet did famous duets with guitarists from Les Paul to Mark Knopfler, but you get the sense from this clip and others (particularly from the 1970s) that he was genuinely in awe of Jerry Reed's talent.
You know you're pretty good when Chet Atkins is in awe of your guitar-playing.
You gotta love the end of the clip, when Jerry hangs his hat on the end of Chet's guitar. It's so easy, so natural, so comic, so in time. The hat just hangs there, dangles, as a tribute or gesture or something about the thing we call "Music" that we share.
In another clip, Jerry thanks Chet for recording his songs so that he wouldn't have to play them anymore.
You almost get the sense of Jerry Reed in his prime as this Mozartian force--coming up with new songs so quickly he didn't have time to even set them down.
Certainly his thumb-and-three-finger-picking style went one more finger than Chet and combined Django Reinhardt with Earl Scruggs.
Plus, Jerry could sing. Not just "sorta sing" like so many great guitarist-writers.
And his lyric writing is as purely and idiosyncratically American as Randy Newman or Warren Zevon (from the social commentary of Lord Mr Ford to alligator-trapping Amos Moses).
I know I could do some typical media-style hand-wringing and say that it's a shame that most people will only remember Jerry as "Snow Man" on the run from Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit movies.
"The pure products of America go crazy . . ." W.C.W. wrote.
Well, none of them were crazier than than Jerry Reed. Or, if he had been born in America rather than Austria, maybe Mozart too.
