Jerry Reed and Burt Reynolds: The Friendship That Turned a Nashville Guitar Picker Into a Movie Star

The Day a Con Man Met a Guitar Band

In February 1974, a film crew rolled into Nashville to shoot a low-budget Depression-era comedy about a good-natured con man who robbed gas stations with a water pistol. Nobody involved thought they were making history. Burt Reynolds was already a movie star by then — Deliverance had seen to that — but W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings was a modest picture, a Southern-fried caper with a country band woven through it. The band’s leader was played by a Georgia-born guitarist and songwriter named Jerry Reed, in his very first film role.

Reed had no business being a natural in front of a camera. He’d spent nearly two decades building a reputation as one of Nashville’s most respected pickers — the man who’d written “Guitar Man” and “U.S. Male” for Elvis Presley, who’d shared a Grammy with Chet Atkins, who’d scored his own hits with “Amos Moses” and “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot.” Acting wasn’t the plan. But something happened on that set that neither man expected. Reynolds, watching Reed work, saw more than a musician doing a favor for a studio. He saw a co-star.

The two men were, on paper, unlikely friends. Reynolds had grown up mostly in Florida, a football star turned stuntman turned leading man, comfortable in front of cameras since his twenties. Reed was a working Nashville session guitarist who’d clawed his way up from a mill town outside Atlanta, more at home in a recording booth than on a soundstage. But something clicked between them almost immediately — a shared sense of humor, a shared sense of where they’d come from, and an obvious, easy chemistry that audiences would eventually recognize even before critics did.

Reynolds liked Jerry Reed’s performance so much he cast him in his very next film — his directorial debut.

W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings wasn’t a blockbuster. It did reasonably well, earned some genuinely warm reviews, and became — decades later — a minor cult favorite, cited by Quentin Tarantino as one of the films that pushed him toward screenwriting. But its real significance had nothing to do with box office numbers. It marked the beginning of a real friendship, one that would go on to reshape both men’s careers and put a Nashville guitar picker in front of more moviegoers than any album ever could have.

Nashville, Session Work, and a Man Nobody Outside Music Row Had Heard Of

To understand why the friendship mattered, you have to understand who Jerry Reed was before Hollywood found him. Born Jerry Reed Hubbard in Atlanta in 1937, he’d been playing guitar and writing songs since he was a teenager. He signed his first recording contract with Capitol at seventeen. It didn’t lead anywhere fast. He bounced through NRC Records, spent two years in the Army, and by the early 1960s had settled into Nashville as a songwriter and in-demand session player — the guy other artists called when they needed a guitar part that sounded like nobody else’s.

Reed developed a picking style all his own — a syncopated, thumb-and-fingers technique that Nashville insiders called “claw style,” built on independent bass and treble lines that made a single guitar sound like two players trading licks. Chet Atkins recognized it immediately and signed Reed to RCA, telling him simply to be himself in the studio. That relationship produced some of the most technically admired instrumental recordings in Nashville history, including the Grammy-winning duet album Me and Jerry in 1970.

Elvis Presley recorded two of Reed’s compositions, “Guitar Man” and “U.S. Male,” in 1968, with Reed himself playing lead guitar on both sessions — a rare vote of confidence from an artist notorious for using his own trusted circle of musicians. Reed’s own recording career built steadily through the late 1960s and into the 1970s: “Amos Moses” crossed over onto the pop charts in 1970, and “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot” topped the country charts and won him a Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance in 1971. He was named the Country Music Association’s Musician of the Year in both 1970 and 1971.

By any reasonable measure, Jerry Reed had already built a significant career by the time he set foot on a film set. But outside of Nashville and outside of the country charts, most Americans had never heard his name. That was about to change — and the man who changed it was standing across from him on a Tennessee backlot, cracking jokes between takes.

Gator: The Director Puts His Money Where His Friendship Was

Reynolds didn’t just enjoy working with Reed. He trusted him enough to hand him a role in his directorial debut. In 1976, Reynolds stepped behind the camera for the first time to direct Gator, a sequel to his earlier hit White Lightning, and he brought Reed along for the ride — not in a novelty cameo, but in a substantial supporting role that let Reed stretch as an actor for the first time. Critics at the Chicago Tribune noted at the time that Reed was playing “a heavy, with no strings” — a real dramatic turn, not a musician doing a walk-on.

It was a meaningful gesture. Directors casting their first film tend to surround themselves with people they trust completely, because a debut behind the camera comes with enough uncertainty already. Reynolds chose Reed. That decision says as much about the friendship as anything either man ever said publicly about it — Reed wasn’t hired because the studio wanted a country star attached to the picture. He was hired because Reynolds wanted him there.

By 1976, the two men had made two films together, and something else was becoming clear: audiences liked watching them together. There was an ease to their scenes, a lived-in warmth that came from an actual friendship rather than a studio-assembled pairing. Hollywood took notice. So did a stunt coordinator turned first-time director named Hal Needham, who was about to hand both men — and country music — its biggest crossover moment yet.

The Turning Point: Smokey and the Bandit

Hal Needham had spent years as one of Hollywood’s top stuntmen, much of that time doubling for Reynolds himself. In 1977, backed by Reynolds’ star power and a modest budget from Universal, Needham made his directing debut with a simple premise: a bootlegger named the Bandit bets he can run four hundred cans of Coors beer from Texarkana to Atlanta in twenty-eight hours, flat out illegal at the time east of the Mississippi, with a persistent Sheriff Buford T. Justice on his tail the whole way.

The film needed a truck driver — the Bandit’s partner, hauling the actual beer while Reynolds’ character ran interference in a black Trans Am. Needham had, by some accounts, initially considered Reed for the lead role of the Bandit himself, back when the film’s budget was closer to a million dollars and Reynolds wasn’t yet attached. Once Reynolds signed on and the project scaled up, Reed slid into the role that would define his screen career: Cledus “Snowman” Snow, the wisecracking trucker with a CB handle and a basset hound named Fred riding shotgun.

The dog was Reynolds’ idea, and the story behind the casting says something about the sense of humor both men shared. According to accounts from the production, Reynolds personally picked Fred for the role — specifically because the dog refused to follow commands. It was the kind of joke Reynolds and Reed would have appreciated equally: a supposedly trained animal actor who did whatever he wanted, cast into a movie about two men who spent the entire runtime ignoring the law.

Needham wanted a theme song and turned to Reed to write it. According to accounts of the production, Reed came back with the finished song in a matter of hours. The result was “East Bound and Down” — a rolling banjo intro, Reed’s unmistakable guitar work, and a lyric that captured the entire spirit of the film in under three minutes. Released as a single, it climbed to number two on the country charts, becoming Reed’s signature song and the unofficial anthem of an entire era of trucking culture.

Needham asked Reed if he could write the movie’s theme song. Reed came back with “East Bound and Down” in a matter of hours.

Smokey and the Bandit released on May 27, 1977, and became one of the highest-grossing films of the year, trailing only Star Wars at the domestic box office. It made Burt Reynolds, already a star, into an even bigger one. And it made Jerry Reed — a Nashville session guitarist most of America had never heard of eighteen months earlier — a household name and a genuine movie star in his own right, playing a character audiences immediately loved.

The film also did something for the culture at large that neither man could have predicted. It set off a nationwide CB radio craze, sent Pontiac Trans Am sales climbing, and cemented an image of the free-wheeling American trucker in the popular imagination that persists to this day. And true to the friendship, Reynolds later gave Reed a real gift to mark the moment — a black 1977 Pontiac Trans Am Limited Edition, identical to the ones used in the film.

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Also on Classic Country TV: The friendship between Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson reshaped Nashville just as much as any partnership from the Smokey and the Bandit era — read the full story of the outlaw brotherhood that started it all.
https://journal.classiccountrytv.com/2026/04/28/willie-nelson-waylon-jennings-friendship-outlaw-country/

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What the Friendship Built: A Screen Partnership That Kept Growing

The success of Smokey and the Bandit didn’t end the collaboration — it accelerated it. Reed and Reynolds went on to make two sequels together, Smokey and the Bandit II in 1980 and Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 in 1983, along with the 1978 trucking comedy High-Ballin’. By the time the third Bandit film came around, Reynolds had largely stepped back from the franchise — appearing only in a brief cameo at the film’s close — while Reed carried a much larger share of the picture. It was a telling shift. What had begun as Reynolds opening doors for a friend had, by the early 1980s, become something closer to an equal partnership, with Reed capable of anchoring a film on his own.

Reynolds’ influence on country music’s Hollywood visibility during this period extended well beyond Reed. He cast Mel Tillis in the Bandit sequels and in The Cannonball Run. He built friendships with Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton, and country artists like Don Williams found their songs placed prominently across his soundtracks. Reynolds, born in Michigan but raised almost entirely in Florida, had an authentic affection for the South and its music that came through in project after project — and Jerry Reed was at the center of all of it, the friend who had opened that door in the first place.

In 1982, Reed headlined a syndicated television special called Jerry Reed and Friends, filmed at the Hermitage Landing outside Nashville and billed as a “music-filled celebrity picnic.” Reynolds appeared as a guest, alongside Glen Campbell, Brenda Lee, Jimmy Dean, and the Statler Brothers — a fitting snapshot of just how thoroughly the two men’s worlds, Hollywood and Nashville, had become intertwined by the friendship they’d built a decade earlier.

The two men continued working together and staying close for the rest of Reed’s life. Reed’s film career carried him into the late 1990s, including a memorable turn as a hard-nosed football coach in Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy in 1998 — a role that introduced him to an entirely new generation of moviegoers who had no idea he’d once been one of Nashville’s most respected session guitarists.

Why This Friendship Still Matters

It would be easy to file the Reed-Reynolds partnership away as a footnote to a string of popular trucking comedies — fun movies, a great theme song, nothing more. But that undersells what actually happened. A working Nashville musician, respected within the industry but essentially unknown outside it, became a genuine movie star because a Hollywood leading man recognized something real in him and kept betting on it, film after film, for over a decade.

That kind of loyalty is rare in any industry, and it’s rarer still in an industry built on turnover and image. Reynolds didn’t need Jerry Reed. He was already one of the biggest stars in the world when they met. He kept casting him anyway — in his directorial debut, in his biggest commercial hit, in film after film for years — because the friendship was real, and because he believed in what Reed brought to a picture.

For country music, the partnership mattered in a different way. It put a genuine Nashville guitar picker — not a Hollywood approximation of one, but the real thing, claw-style picking and all — in front of tens of millions of moviegoers who might never have listened to a country radio station otherwise. “East Bound and Down” became a crossover hit precisely because it was attached to a character audiences already loved, played by a musician who could actually play what he was pretending to play. The film didn’t manufacture Jerry Reed’s authenticity. It just gave the rest of the country a chance to see it.

Jerry Reed died on September 1, 2008, at his home outside Nashville, following complications from emphysema. He was 71. Burt Reynolds outlived his friend by a decade, passing away in 2018. In the years between, and by all accounts, the friendship they’d built on a Tennessee film set in 1974 never really faded — it just became one more chapter in a life the two men had, in a very real sense, built together, one movie at a time.

At Classic Country TV, our goal is simple — keep the stories behind the songs alive. And the story behind “East Bound and Down” isn’t really about a truck full of beer. It’s about two men from very different worlds who recognized something in each other worth building on, and who spent a decade proving they were right.

Gear for the Open Road

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Leather Goods & Accessories

MAKE LIFE EXCLUSIVE Leather Toiletry Bag
If Jerry Reed and Burt Reynolds taught us anything, it’s that a life on the road needs a little organization to go with the chaos. This handsome leather dopp kit is built for exactly that kind of travel — durable, simple, and built to last.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0829WQD39?tag=classiccoun08-20

Amazon Essentials Men’s Leather Belt
A no-nonsense classic leather belt, the kind of everyday piece that outlasts trends entirely — sturdy, versatile, and right at home whether you’re headed to the Opry or the highway.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CXXXQF5F?tag=classiccoun08-20

Camping & Travel Gear

RTIC 20oz Road Trip Travel Mug
It’s practically named for this story. Ceramic-lined, vacuum insulated, and built for long hauls — the kind of mug that would have felt right at home in the Snowman’s cab.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DM3DGNH4?tag=classiccoun08-20

Amazon Basics Insulated Cooler Bag
Fifty cans of capacity and built for exactly the kind of cross-country run the Bandit made famous. Simple, reliable, and always ready for the next trip.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D62KHZ8N?tag=classiccoun08-20

Bar & Whiskey Accessories

KITNATS Old Fashioned Whiskey Glasses, Set of 4
A solid, no-frills rocks glass set for winding down after a long day — the kind of barware that belongs in every classic country fan’s home bar.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08ZXVY3MN?tag=classiccoun08-20

YWQ Stainless Steel American Flag Flask
Leather-wrapped, leak-proof, and unmistakably American — a fitting nod to the Southern pride that ran through everything Reed and Reynolds made together.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JH1RGC4?tag=classiccoun08-20

From the Classic Country TV Shop

Classic Country. No Apologies. — Outlaw Shield Tee
https://classiccountrytv.com/products/classic-country-no-apologies-outlaw-shield-tee

Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes? — The Legends Tribute Hardcover Journal
https://classiccountrytv.com/products/whos-gonna-fill-their-shoes-the-legends-tribute-hardcover-journal

Sources

Wikipedia — Jerry Reed
Career overview, chart history, and filmography details confirming the timeline of Reed’s collaborations with Burt Reynolds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Reed

Wikipedia — W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings
Production history confirming the 1974 Nashville filming that brought Reed and Reynolds together for the first time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.W._and_the_Dixie_Dancekings

Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum — Jerry Reed
Biographical detail on Reed’s Nashville career, his RCA years with Chet Atkins, and his later film work.
https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/hall-of-fame/jerry-reed

IMDb — Jerry Reed Biography
Additional detail on Reed’s film career and the personal gift of a Trans Am from Burt Reynolds.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0715274/bio

Saving Country Music — “Burt Reynolds Helped Prove That Country Music Was Cool”
Commentary on the depth of the Reed-Reynolds friendship and Reynolds’ broader impact on country music’s visibility in Hollywood.
https://savingcountrymusic.com/burt-reynolds-helped-prove-that-country-music-was-cool/

Classic Country Music — “7 Facts About Smokey and the Bandit”
Production details on the making of the film, including the casting of Fred the basset hound and the writing of “East Bound and Down.”
https://classiccountrymusic.com/7-facts-about-smokey-and-the-bandit/

Frequently Asked Questions