Jerry Reed
The songs came first with Jerry Reed, and they stayed first. He was a Nashville guitar player and songwriter whose catalogue includes Guitar Man, Amos Moses, When You're Hot, You're Hot and East Bound and Down, and the Grammy recognition he collected was for the music rather than the movies. When he acted, he acted like a musician: loose, fast-talking, incapable of hiding the fact that he was enjoying himself.
The screen career is essentially one relationship. He showed up as Bama McCall in Gator in 1976 and then as Cledus Snow, the trucker running interference in Smokey and the Bandit, and the chemistry of that pairing carried him through two sequels and a decade of good-old-boy parts. What he brought was rhythm. He plays a scene the way he plays a guitar line, coming in early, pushing the tempo, leaving the other actor sounding like the straight man by comparison.
He was better than the material usually asked for. A Vietnam war picture put him in uniform as a colonel and he holds it without the drawl doing the work, and late in the run he took the villain in The Waterboy, a piece of casting that understood exactly what audiences remembered about him and turned it sour on purpose. The music is the legacy. The films are why people can still hear the voice.
Movies (10)
Where to start with Jerry Reed
Smokey and the Bandit first, and not only because it is the famous one: Cledus is the part that shows what he does, driving the plot and the comic tempo at the same time, and that is his voice on the theme song running underneath it. Gator came earlier and is the meaner film, worth finding if you want him playing something with teeth.
The sequels decline in the expected order. Smokey and the Bandit II still has the cast; Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 is for completists only, and even the credit row cannot agree on which character he is playing. Save Bat★21 for when you want to watch him take a serious part seriously, and The Waterboy for the late-career joke at his own expense. High-Ballin' is the deep cut for trucker-movie obsessives.