On April 18, 2008, Jerry Reed released the last album of his life. It was called The Gallant Few, and it came out on R2K Records, his own small independent label. It was not a comeback record or a greatest-hits package. It was made to raise money for wounded American veterans. Less than five months later, on September 1, 2008, Jerry Reed died of complications from emphysema. He was 71.
For a man most people remember as the wisecracking Snowman in Smokey and the Bandit, it was a quiet way to say goodbye. But when he died, The Tennessean wrote that he was especially proud of that final project.
The Songs on The Gallant Few
The Gallant Few runs just ten tracks and a little over half an hour. When the Associated Press reported his death, it described the album as a collection of songs Jerry Reed wrote about wounded war veterans, the result of what he called his mission in recent years: making sure they would not be forgotten.
Reed sings five of the ten tracks himself, including “American Veteran,” the longest song on the record at nearly six minutes, along with “Boys of 44,” “Going Home,” “Wounded Warrior” and his own version of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The album opens with “Warrior Spirit,” performed by the men’s choir of Trevecca Nazarene, a university in Nashville. His daughter Seidina sings “Today Is Mine,” and Gordon Kennedy, James “Moby” Carney and Chester Lee each sing one track.
It was, in other words, a small record built around one cause, with his own daughter’s voice on it. Jerry Reed knew Army life himself. He enlisted in 1959, the same year he married his wife, Prissy, and spent his service playing in an Army band before his discharge in 1961.
From Taking to Giving
Back in 1998, Jerry Reed told a reporter that when people asked about his motivation, he had a simple answer: money. Less than a decade later, he sounded like a different man.
In 2007, he sat down with Tim Ghianni of The Tennessean and explained why he had turned his attention to veterans and to spiritual studies as his health declined.
“For 50 years, all I’d done was take, take, take.”
He told Ghianni he had decided that from then on, his life would be about giving, and that he felt he was already far behind. All of us were, he said. We live as if this world is everything, when in truth we are only here for a moment, gone like a puff of smoke.
Recording Until He Couldn’t
Jerry Reed had been a heavy smoker for most of his life, and it caught up with him. He had already been through quadruple bypass surgery in June 1999, after years of keeping a road schedule of around 80 shows a year. By the mid-2000s, emphysema was slowly taking his breath away, and he largely stepped back from performing, though he kept making music on his own label, releasing a live album in 2005 and new studio work after that.
The Gallant Few was the last of it. When he died, his longtime booking agent, Carrie Moore-Reed, who was not related to him, told the Los Angeles Times that he had been ill for some time.
“He was still recording right up until he couldn’t anymore.”
When the Guitar Went Quiet
For a man who taught a generation of pickers how to play, the hardest part of the last months was the guitar itself. According to The Tennessean, Jerry Reed’s one regret about his instrument was that his failing health meant he could no longer play it. Music would have been a comfort, and it was no longer within reach.
So the comfort came from people instead. His family stayed close, and old friends came by to visit, among them Brenda Lee, who had a Top 10 pop hit with one of his songs back in 1960, and Bobby Bare, who had spent countless hours fishing with him on Tennessee lakes. They told stories and jokes. Reed would get laughing so hard that he had to stop, try to be serious for a moment, and catch what breath he had left.
On a day in August 2008, Reed told Bare something he had been thinking about a lot: every dream he had ever dreamed had come true. He had said much the same to an interviewer a few years earlier, marveling that a cotton mill boy from Georgia had gotten to write hit songs, make records and go to Hollywood.
What He Left Behind
Jerry Reed died a few weeks later, on September 1, 2008. He was survived by Prissy, his wife of 49 years, and his daughters, Seidina and Lottie.
Nine years later, in 2017, he was chosen for the Country Music Hall of Fame. Seidina and Lottie stood in for their father when the news was announced in Nashville.
Most fans will always hear “East Bound and Down” first when they think of Jerry Reed. But the last songs he put his name on were for soldiers who came home hurt, recorded by a man who was running out of breath himself.
Did you ever hear The Gallant Few, or catch Jerry Reed on one of his last shows? We would love to hear your memories.