For a musician who had a long, successful career that produced plenty of enduring hits, Jerry Reed has been woefully underserved in proper career retrospectives. Raven's 2009 When You're Hot...The Very Best of Jerry Reed: 1967-1983, released just a matter of months after Reed's passing in 2008, goes a long way to rectifying that wrong, offering a 28-track overview that runs through Jerry's hits from "Guitar Man" to "Good Ole Boys." As generous as this is, this still doesn't contain a fair number of his Billboard country ...
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For a musician who had a long, successful career that produced plenty of enduring hits, Jerry Reed has been woefully underserved in proper career retrospectives. Raven's 2009 When You're Hot...The Very Best of Jerry Reed: 1967-1983, released just a matter of months after Reed's passing in 2008, goes a long way to rectifying that wrong, offering a 28-track overview that runs through Jerry's hits from "Guitar Man" to "Good Ole Boys." As generous as this is, this still doesn't contain a fair number of his Billboard country chart entries -- mainly minor hits scattered throughout the years such as "The Preacher and the Bear," "Another Puff," "The Uptown Poker Club," but also the number two "(I'm Just A) Redneck in a Rock & Roll Band" from 1977 -- and the focus on singles downplays his monumental fingerpicking in favor of his humor, as there is no room for such instrumental classics as "The Claw." This is a drawback but not a major one because When You're Hot serves up more prime Jerry Reed than any other CD, offering all the classics in chronological order. This sequencing shows how he slowly expanded his instrumental palette, adding in keyboards and horns, eventually winding his way to an electric guitar on "Amos Moses" -- and it also exposes a handful of sleepy easy listening hits from the late '70s, delivered just after Smokey & the Bandit made him a household name -- but it can sometimes cut against Reed, revealing just how often he rewrote his smash hits, riffing on licks and jokes all the way into the early '80s, when he gave "The Bird" the same chords as "She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft)." Of course, much of the joy of Jerry is that he never hid his hucksterism; he always worked his audience hard, cracking corny jokes and aiming to please. In a way, that's the charm of this excellent -- not quite definitive due to that lack of instrumentals, but much closer than any other collection -- retrospective: it's Jerry the Alabama Wildman at the top of his game. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi
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