Country Singer Jerry Reed Passes Away at 71

Grammy-winning country singer and Burt Reynolds' Smokey and the Bandit cohort Jerry Reed died of complications from emphysema on Monday. He was 71. As a songwriter, Reed penned songs for Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole and scores more. In 1971, Reed won a Grammy for his own "When You're Hot, You're Hot." Reed won three Grammys over his career, including two for collaborations with Chet Atkins. Reed's segue into films helped inspire his Nashville peers like Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Kenny Rogers to try their hand at acting. In addition to his turn in the Smokey series, Reed was also immortalized as the rival coach in Adam Sandler's The Waterboy and the "Phantom of the Country Music Hall" episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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