Even when he could no longer cross a room without an oxygen line trailing behind him, Jerry Reed still leaned over his guitar in his quiet Brentwood study and wrote songs he hoped Merle Haggard would sing for him.
His youngest daughter Lottie Reed watched that daily ritual in his final years. With a nasal cannula in place and his strength fading, he had lost the wind to record a full album or command a stage, yet his right hand remained sharp on the nylon strings as he shaped new melodies and chord progressions. Each time he finished a piece he knew his own booming baritone could never carry into a vocal booth, he told Lottie it belonged to his longtime friend Haggard and seemed content simply knowing the music would live on in another voice.
He kept writing for his friends long after his own breath gave out.
For more than four decades Reed had been one of the most restless forces in American entertainment. He tore across stages with his syncopated clawhammer guitar attack and traded quick lines with Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. Years of heavy smoking through all night Nashville recording sessions and long film shoots eventually damaged his lungs, gradually pulling the three time Grammy winner off the road in the early 2000s as severe emphysema took hold.
He still refused to put away his gut string guitar or give up the band he had carried for years. In 2005 he released the live album Jerry Reed Live Still with his wife Priscilla Mitchell on keyboards. He followed it in October 2006 with Lets Git It On through his independent R2K Records label.
The strain on his body deepened after quadruple bypass heart surgery in Nashville in January 2005. He survived the operation, but heart trouble combined with chronic respiratory failure confined the once bounding showman to his house outside Nashville, where every step was measured by the length of a plastic oxygen line.
Reed poured much of his remaining energy into one last project for military veterans, a cause that stayed close to him since his own two year stint in the United States Army at the end of the 1950s. Working with family and friends including his older daughter Seidina and the Trevecca Nazarene Mens Choir, he completed The Gallant Few in 2008. The ten track charity album was recorded to raise money for wounded American soldiers returning from overseas.
Music Row never forgot what he had given to Nashville guitar. Long before illness slowed him, Chet Atkins had named Reed one of only four players to hold the honorary title of Certified Guitar Player, and younger stars like Brad Paisley openly studied his thumb and finger technique.
Friends from his prime stayed close as his health declined. Bobby Bare and Mel Tillis, his partners alongside the late Waylon Jennings in the 1998 Old Dogs supergroup that recorded an entire album of Shel Silverstein songs about aging, kept in touch through those hard years. Whenever Nashville acquaintances stopped by the Brentwood house, Reed spent whatever breath he could spare on jokes so the room would not feel heavy.
In August 2008 he had grown too frail to appear in public, so representatives from the Country Music Association and the Recording Academy came directly to his home to present him with honors in person. Priscilla, his wife of forty nine years, cared for him around the clock and stayed beside his oxygen tank through the final weeks.
Reed died from complications of emphysema in the early hours of September 1 2008 at age 71 and was laid to rest at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Nashville. His friends kept speaking up for him afterward. Burt Reynolds campaigned for years to see his former co star receive country musics highest honor, calling Reed the heart of their films and the most loyal friend he ever had.
In October 2017 Bobby Bare stood onstage in Nashville to formally induct Reed into the Country Music Hall of Fame. It was a fitting answer for a boy who first found company in six strings as a seven year old in Atlanta and held onto that guitar right to the end.