The Night Jerry Reed Invented “The Claw” — And Nashville Guitar Was Never the Same

In the fall of 1967, a Nashville session guitarist named Jerry Reed walked into RCA Studio B and recorded a two-minute instrumental that nobody had asked for. It didn’t have a story. It didn’t have a punchline. It was just Reed, alone with a hollow-body electric guitar, playing something that sounded like two guitarists fighting over the same instrument — a thumping, syncopated bassline running underneath a tangle of melody, both coming out of the same ten fingers at the same time.

The song was called “The Claw.” And the way Reed played it — thumb pounding out rhythm low on the strings while his fingers picked out melody high and fast, both hands moving like they belonged to two different musicians — didn’t have an official name yet. Session players around Nashville had started calling it “the claw” themselves, half joking, because of the way Reed’s right hand curled over the strings like something out of a monster movie. The name stuck. So did the technique. Six decades later, guitarists are still trying to figure out exactly how he did it.

Most people who know Jerry Reed’s name know him as Cledus Snow, the wisecracking trucker riding shotgun with Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. Some know him as the guy who sang about a nine-foot alligator named Amos Moses, or the one who told Mr. Ford exactly what he thought of modern inconveniences. Fewer people know that before any of that, Reed quietly rewrote the rules of how a guitar could be played — and that Chet Atkins, a man not exactly short on guitar heroes to admire, once said Reed’s playing scared him a little. This is the story of how a self-taught kid from Atlanta invented a technique so strange and so effective that it’s still called by the nickname the Nashville studio circuit gave it on the spot: the claw.

A Kid Who Taught Himself the Wrong Way — On Purpose

Jerry Reed Hubbard was born in Atlanta on March 20, 1937, into a household that didn’t stay together long. His parents split when he was an infant, and he spent stretches of his early childhood in foster care before eventually settling with a family that gave him some stability. What he didn’t have in a settled home life, he found in a guitar. By most accounts, he picked one up around age seven, taught a few chords by his mother, and from there simply refused to put it down.

Atlanta in the late 1940s wasn’t Nashville. There was no Music Row, no RCA Studio B, no dense network of pickers trading licks after church on Sunday. What Reed had instead was a radio, a stack of records, and an obsessive ear. He listened to Merle Travis and Chet Atkins the way other kids listened to baseball games — over and over, trying to reverse-engineer what he was hearing without anyone in the room to correct his form. That detail matters more than it might seem. Travis-style picking — alternating a steady thumb bass with fingerpicked melody on top — was already a known, codified technique by the time Reed was a teenager. Merle Travis had built it. Chet Atkins had taken it and pushed it into something even more intricate. Reed had access to the sound of that style through records, but not to a teacher who could show him the proper hand position, the accepted fingering, the “right” way to do it.

So he didn’t do it right. He did it his own way — and his own way turned out to be something nobody in Nashville had quite seen before.

By his early teens, Reed was already good enough to share stages with Faron Young and Ernest Tubb around the Atlanta area, sitting in wherever a working guitarist was needed. Atlanta music publisher Bill Lowery took notice of the teenager’s writing and playing, and in 1955, at just eighteen years old, Reed signed his first recording contract with Capitol Records. The Capitol years — a run of rockabilly and country sides recorded between 1955 and 1958 — didn’t produce a hit for Reed himself. But they did something else: they put his songwriting in front of other artists. Gene Vincent recorded Reed’s “Crazy Legs” in 1958. It wasn’t much, commercially. But it was proof that the kid from Atlanta could write, even if Nashville hadn’t yet figured out what to do with the way he played.

Reed’s deal with Capitol ended in 1958, and he enlisted in the U.S. Army the following year, serving two years that took him away from the studio but not away from music entirely — he played guitar for the Circle A Wranglers, the Army’s own band, keeping his hands moving even in uniform. It was during this stretch, in 1960, that Brenda Lee had a hit with Reed’s composition “That’s All You Gotta Do,” a song he’d written before shipping out. The royalty checks weren’t life-changing, but they were confirmation: somebody in Nashville was listening to what he wrote, even if almost nobody yet understood how he played it.

When Reed got out of the Army and moved to Nashville in 1961, he wasn’t chasing a solo career so much as trying to survive as a working musician — writing songs, picking up session work, playing wherever a guitarist was needed. It was steady, unglamorous work. And it put him directly in the orbit of the two people whose paths would matter most to what happened next: Porter Wagoner, who had a number-one hit in 1962 with Reed’s “Misery Loves Company,” and, more consequentially, Chet Atkins — the most powerful man in the Nashville recording industry, and a guitarist good enough to actually recognize what he was looking at when Jerry Reed sat down and played.

He didn’t have a teacher to tell him the “right” way to fingerpick — so he built his own way from scratch, and it turned out to be something nobody in Nashville had quite seen before.

By 1962, Reed had scored some modest chart action of his own with singles like “Goodnight Irene” and “Hully Gully Guitar,” recorded with a female vocal group billed as the Hully Girlies. It wasn’t the sound that would eventually define him, but it did one important thing: it put a tape in front of Chet Atkins at RCA Victor. Atkins, who by then had already shaped the careers of Jim Reeves, Skeeter Davis, and dozens of others as the architect of what the industry was calling the Nashville Sound, heard something in Reed’s playing that made him want to sign the kid directly — not just as a songwriter, but as a guitarist and recording artist in his own right. In 1965, Reed released “If I Don’t Live Up to It” for RCA, produced by Atkins. The commercial needle barely moved. But the relationship that mattered — the one between Reed and Atkins — was just getting started.

The Student Who Made the Teacher Nervous

Chet Atkins did not hand out his approval cheaply. By the mid-1960s, he had already earned the nickname “Mr. Guitar” and had spent two decades as the standard against which every fingerstyle picker in country music measured himself. He was, by any reasonable definition, the best guitarist in Nashville, and he had built a career — and eventually RCA’s entire Nashville operation — on knowing exactly how good a guitarist needed to be before it was worth his time.

So when Atkins told Reed, in essence, to stop trying to sound like anybody else and just play the way he actually played — to let the strange, syncopated, thumb-and-fingers attack he’d taught himself in an Atlanta bedroom come out fully, without smoothing off the rough edges — it wasn’t a small piece of advice. It was permission. And for a guitarist whose technique had developed in isolation, without a teacher to tell him he was doing anything “wrong,” that permission was exactly what he needed to hear.

What Reed had built, largely by trial and error, was a variation on Travis picking — the alternating-thumb style Merle Travis had popularized and Chet Atkins himself had refined into something even more complex — but pushed into more aggressive, syncopated territory. Where classic Travis picking keeps the thumb locked into a steady, almost metronomic alternating bass pattern while the fingers work the melody on top, Reed’s version let the rhythm get looser, funkier, and more percussive. His thumb wasn’t just keeping time; it was practically playing its own competing rhythm part, while his fingers — curled inward toward the strings in a distinctive hooked shape that gave the technique its nickname — picked out fast, syncopated melodic runs that ducked and wove around the bass line instead of simply sitting on top of it.

The result sounded less like a folk fingerpicker and more like a one-man rhythm section — bass, rhythm guitar, and lead melody, all happening at once, all coming out of a single instrument. It had swing in it, and a kind of funky, syncopated pocket that pulled as much from jazz and blues phrasing as it did from the Travis-Atkins lineage it grew out of. It was recognizably related to what Chet Atkins did. It was also, unmistakably, something else entirely.

Around the RCA studios, other pickers started using a specific word for what Reed’s right hand did. “The claw” wasn’t a term Reed invented for himself, at least not in any grandiose sense — it was Nashville studio slang, born out of the way his fingers and thumb hooked and curled over the strings in a shape unlike the more relaxed, open-hand position most fingerstyle players used. It looked unusual. It sounded even more unusual. And by the time Reed cut the instrumental that would carry the name officially, the nickname had already been circulating among the musicians who watched him work.

“The Claw” appeared on Reed’s 1967 RCA album The Unbelievable Guitar and Voice of Jerry Reed, produced by Atkins, alongside session players including guitarists Wayne Moss and Fred Carter Jr. It’s an instrumental — no story, no punchline, none of the wisecracking persona that would later make Reed a movie star. It’s just a guitarist demonstrating, at full speed, exactly what his hands could do. Among musicians, the track became something like a rite of passage: a piece that separated guitarists who could play fast from guitarists who could actually keep two independent rhythmic ideas going in the same hand at the same time.

The same year, Reed had his best chart showing to date with the self-penned “Guitar Man,” which climbed to number 53 on the country chart — a modest showing by the numbers, but a song that was about to matter a great deal more to Reed’s career than its chart position suggested.

The Feel Elvis Couldn’t Get Without Him

“Guitar Man” caught the attention of Elvis Presley, who decided to cover it later in 1967. What happened next has become one of the more telling stories in Nashville session lore — not because it was dramatic, but because of what it revealed about how specific and personal Reed’s technique actually was.

Presley’s team recorded “Guitar Man” without Reed in the studio. According to accounts from musicians and producers who were present, the results didn’t have the right feel. The syncopation, the percussive drive, the particular way the guitar part locked into its own rhythm — it wasn’t translating. Presley’s producer, Felton Jarvis, made the call: bring in Jerry Reed himself to play on the session. Reed did, on January 15 and 16, 1968, contributing guitar to “Guitar Man” as well as a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” and Reed’s own composition “U.S. Male,” recorded during the same sessions. With Reed’s hands actually on the strings, the part locked into place. Elvis Presley — who had, by that point in his career, worked with some of the finest session musicians in the world — needed the specific guitarist who invented the part to get the part right.

That detail is worth sitting with. It wasn’t that Reed’s technique was simply difficult. Difficult techniques can usually be learned by a sufficiently skilled session player given enough studio time. What Reed had built was something closer to a signature — a particular relationship between thumb and fingers, tension and release, that was bound up with his own physical approach to the instrument in a way that resisted straightforward imitation. Other guitarists could play notes that were technically identical to what Reed played. Getting the same feel out of them was another matter.

Presley went on to record a total of four Jerry Reed compositions across his career, including “A Thing Called Love” in 1971 and “Talk About the Good Times” in 1973. Johnny Cash also cut “A Thing Called Love” as a single in 1971, taking it to number two on the Billboard Country Singles chart and using it as the title track for an album the following year. Reed’s songwriting was, by the start of the 1970s, firmly established. But his guitar playing — the thing that had actually gotten Elvis’s attention in the first place — remained something closer to an insider’s secret, known mostly to the session players and producers who’d watched him work up close.

Amos Moses, Chart Success, and a Career Built on Two Instruments — His Voice and His Hands

The 1970s opened with Reed finally breaking through as a hitmaker in his own right, and the technique he’d spent a decade refining became the engine underneath his biggest records. “Amos Moses,” released in 1970, fused rock, funk, and Cajun-flavored storytelling into a single crossover hit that reached number eight on the U.S. pop chart — a genuinely rare feat for a country single at the time. Underneath the story of a swamp-dwelling alligator hunter, the guitar part driving the whole song forward was pure claw technique: syncopated, percussive, doing the job of a full rhythm section by itself.

That same year, Reed teamed with Chet Atkins for the duet album Me & Jerry, which earned the pair a Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance — an unambiguous, industry-recognized confirmation that the student’s playing now stood alongside the mentor’s as some of the finest guitar work Nashville had to offer. It wasn’t a novelty pairing. It was two virtuosos, one of whom had built the vocabulary and one of whom had taken that vocabulary somewhere entirely new, playing as equals.

In 1971, Reed released “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” a loose, spoken-word-heavy story song that topped the country charts for five weeks and cracked the pop Top 10. It won him a Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance — recognition for his voice and persona, this time, rather than his guitar work specifically. That distinction started to matter. Reed’s public identity was rapidly becoming defined by his humor, his storytelling, and his easy Southern charisma — the same qualities that would soon make him a natural fit for Hollywood. The guitar technique that had impressed Chet Atkins and gotten him hired by Elvis kept doing its work quietly, embedded in nearly everything he recorded, while the persona out front got louder and more famous.

“Lord, Mr. Ford,” released in 1973, became another number-one country hit, its wry commentary on modern inconvenience riding on the same rhythmic, funky guitar foundation. By the time “East Bound and Down” became the theme song for 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit — a film in which Reed co-starred as trucker Cledus Snow, launching him into a second career as a movie star — the guitar technique that had once made Chet Atkins take notice had become so fully woven into Reed’s sound that casual listeners barely registered it as remarkable anymore. It was just how a Jerry Reed record sounded. That, in its own way, is a measure of how completely he’d made the style his own.

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Also on Classic Country TV: Jerry Reed’s full life story — the songwriting, the film career, and the guitar work that started it all — gets the complete treatment in our Artist Deep Dive. Read the complete Jerry Reed story here.

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Why Hollywood Made People Forget He Was a Guitarist First

Smokey and the Bandit changed the shape of Jerry Reed’s career, and not entirely for the better when it comes to how history has remembered him. His friendship with Burt Reynolds led to roles in W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975) and Gator (1976) before Cledus Snow made him a household name to audiences who had never heard “The Claw” or cared who played guitar on an Elvis session. Reed went on to appear in more than a dozen films across his career, including two more Smokey and the Bandit sequels, 1988’s Bat*21, and 1998’s The Waterboy, in which he played Adam Sandler’s football coach.

For an entire generation, that’s who Jerry Reed was: the funny trucker, the good-humored Southern character actor, the guy who could deliver a punchline as naturally as he delivered a guitar lick. It’s not an inaccurate picture — Reed genuinely was that entertaining, that quick, that at ease in front of a camera. But it obscured something the Nashville studio community had known since the mid-1960s: that underneath the comedian and the movie star was one of the most technically inventive guitarists his hometown had ever produced, a player good enough that Chet Atkins wanted him under RCA’s roof specifically because of what his hands could do.

“Because he was such a great, colorful personality with his acting and songs and entertaining, sometimes people didn’t even notice that he was just about the best guitarist you’ll ever hear.” — Brad Paisley

Reed and Atkins continued their musical partnership across the decades, recording Me and Chet in 1972 and, twenty years later, Sneakin’ Around for Columbia Records — a third collaborative album that won yet another Grammy, this one for Best Country Instrumental Performance, in 1993. It’s a rare thing for a mentor-student relationship in country music to remain creatively active across nearly thirty years, producing award-winning work at both ends of that span. It says something about how seriously both men took the guitar itself, even as one of them became one of the most recognizable comic actors in American film.

In 1982, Reed’s career as a hit-making singles artist got a late revival with “She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft),” which went to number one, followed by “The Bird,” which peaked at number two. That same year, he headlined a syndicated TV special called Jerry Reed and Friends, a “music-filled celebrity picnic” filmed at Hermitage Landing featuring guest stars including Burt Reynolds, Glen Campbell, and the Statler Brothers. Reed and Campbell performed “Southern Nights” together, with Campbell publicly crediting Reed for showing him the guitar lick that anchored the song years earlier — one more quiet data point in a career full of them, evidence of how far Reed’s influence reached even when his name wasn’t the one on the record.

Old Dogs, Later Years, and a Technique That Refused to Fade

By the 1990s, Reed’s chart-topping days were behind him, but the guitar playing hadn’t dulled with age. In 1998, he joined fellow veterans Waylon Jennings, Mel Tillis, and Bobby Bare to form Old Dogs, a self-aware supergroup of country elder statesmen who recorded a single album of Shel Silverstein-penned songs about growing older without any interest in going quietly. Reed sang lead on “Young Man’s Job” and “Elvis Has Left the Building” — the latter a fitting song for a man who’d spent time in the studio with Presley himself decades earlier.

A 1992 episode of TNN’s American Music Shop captured Reed and Atkins performing together on live television, still trading licks, still demonstrating the technique that had connected them since the mid-1960s — proof that neither man had lost his taste for pushing the other. Reed continued releasing music into the 2000s on his own independent label, and continued performing even as emphysema increasingly affected his health in his final years.

Jerry Reed died in Nashville on September 1, 2008, at age 71. In April 2017, he was announced as an inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, officially inducted that October by his old Old Dogs bandmate Bobby Bare. He had already been inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum, an institution built specifically to honor the players — the session musicians, the technicians, the people whose names rarely made it onto a marquee but whose hands shaped how records actually sounded. For a guitarist whose public image had spent decades being pulled toward comedy and film, that particular honor lands differently. It was recognition from the people who understood, firsthand, exactly what his hands could do.

Why It Still Matters

Guitarists are still studying “The Claw” today, and not as a historical curiosity. The Country Music Hall of Fame’s own account of Reed’s career describes his method plainly: a syncopated, fingerstyle technique combining independent lines in the guitar’s bass and treble ranges, using rippling combinations of fretted and open strings to create a sound unlike anything else coming out of Nashville at the time. Contemporary hybrid pickers — guitarists who blend pick-and-fingers or pure fingerstyle approaches into fast, syncopated, genre-crossing playing — trace a direct line back to what Reed was doing in the mid-1960s, whether or not they’ve ever heard “The Claw” by name. Brad Paisley has spoken openly about Reed’s underrated status as a guitarist. Steve Wariner, a Nashville guitar virtuoso in his own right, has cited Reed as a formative influence. Session players Steve Gibson and Brent Mason, two of the most in-demand Nashville guitarists of the following generations, both absorbed elements of Reed’s approach into their own playing.

There’s a particular kind of country music history that gets preserved almost by accident — through the memory of session players, through liner notes, through guitarists passing techniques down player to player rather than through any formal record. Jerry Reed’s claw technique lives mostly in that kind of history. It never got the institutional documentation that classical guitar techniques receive. It exists instead in the recordings themselves, in the memories of the Nashville studio community that watched him invent it, and in the hands of every guitarist since who’s tried to figure out how a kid with no formal training in an Atlanta bedroom taught himself to make one hand sound like two.

That’s the story worth holding onto. Not just that Jerry Reed was funny, or that he could hold his own next to Burt Reynolds and Adam Sandler on a movie screen — though he genuinely could. It’s that decades before any of that, a self-taught teenager decided the “right” way to play guitar wasn’t worth waiting around to learn, built his own way instead, and ended up teaching Nashville something it didn’t know it needed. Chet Atkins heard it and made room for it. Elvis Presley needed it and couldn’t get the feel any other way. And two generations of Nashville guitarists have been chasing it ever since. At Classic Country TV, our goal is simple — keep the stories behind the songs alive. Jerry Reed’s hands deserve to be part of that story just as much as his punchlines.

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Also on Classic Country TV: Chet Atkins wasn’t just Jerry Reed’s producer — he was the architect of an entire era. See how his RCA circle connects to the outlaw movement that followed in our story on Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson’s friendship. Read it here.

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Guitar & Instruments

Fender Dragon Capo
Reed’s picking hand did most of the work, but a good capo is still the fastest way to explore new keys without relearning your fingerings — a trick every working Nashville picker leaned on. Lightweight cast aluminum with a quick micro-dial adjustment.
Shop the Fender Dragon Capo on Amazon

Jim Dunlop Shell Fingerpicks & Thumbpick Set
You won’t build a claw-style attack overnight, but a proper thumbpick-and-fingerpicks set is where every serious fingerstyle player starts — the same basic tool Travis-style pickers have relied on for generations.
Shop the Dunlop Fingerpick Set on Amazon

Listening & Audio

Victrola Journey Bluetooth Suitcase Record Player
There’s still no better way to hear the syncopated attack of a track like “The Claw” than off vinyl, with all the warmth and grit the original RCA session tape had. This suitcase-style turntable brings that experience home in a compact, portable design.
Shop the Victrola Journey Record Player on Amazon

Retrospekt Retro Foam On-Ear Headphones
For late-night listening sessions spent picking apart a guitar break note by note, these vintage-styled on-ear headphones plug straight into a turntable’s headphone jack and keep the nostalgia going from the record to your ears.
Shop Retrospekt Retro Headphones on Amazon

Leather Goods & Accessories

Perri’s Leathers Italian Leather Guitar Strap
A soft, suede-backed Italian leather strap built for exactly the kind of long, physically demanding picking sessions Reed’s technique requires — comfortable enough to wear through hours of practice without digging into your shoulder.
Shop the Perri’s Leathers Guitar Strap on Amazon

Leather Guitar Pick Holder Keychain
Full-grain leather, sized to clip onto your keys, and built to keep a handful of picks from disappearing into the bottom of a gig bag — a small, practical nod to the working-picker’s life Reed lived for most of his career.
Shop the Leather Pick Holder Keychain on Amazon

Sources

Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Official biographical and technical account of Reed’s playing style, career, and RCA-era recordings, including his development of the claw technique and Musicians Hall of Fame recognition.
https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/hall-of-fame/jerry-reed

Country Music Hall of Fame — Nashville Cats Exhibit
Detailed session discography and studio credits documenting Reed’s work as a guitarist for RCA artists including Elvis Presley and Merle Haggard.
https://countrymusichalloffame.org/exhibit/dylan-cash-and-the-nashville-cats-a-new-music-city/the-nashville-cats/jerry-reed/

New Georgia Encyclopedia
Biographical account of Reed’s Atlanta upbringing, early career, and recording history.
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/jerry-reed-1937-2008/

Wikipedia — Jerry Reed
General biographical reference cross-checked against primary sources for chronology and discography details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Reed

Wide Open Country
Coverage of Reed and Chet Atkins’s 1992 televised performance on TNN’s American Music Shop.
https://www.wideopencountry.com/elder-statesmen-jerry-reed-chet-atkins-flaunt-guitar-skills-tv/

The Boot
Career retrospective covering Reed’s guitar work and songwriting catalog.
https://theboot.com/jerry-reed-songs/

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