Jerry

About me:

Jerry Reed Hubbard was the second child born to Robert Spencer Hubbard and Cynthia Hubbard, two Atlanta cotton mill workers who barely earned enough money to keep the family together. Jerry's birth on March 20,1937 strained an already troubled marriage, and four months later the couple separated. For the next seven years Jerry and his sister were shuttled between Georgia orphanages and foster homes. They finally returned home in 1944 when their mother married Hubert Howard, another mill worker. Music provided a welcome diversion for the family. "When I was a kid of six or seven, I used to get up on the stove woodpile for a stage and I'd put on the wildest show," Reed told Bob Anderson in a 1979 'Pickin' interview. "I'd sit beside the radio and listen to the Grand Ole Opry and play rhythm on a hairbrush. Encouraged by her son's continuing passion for music, Cynthia Howard saved seven dollars to buy a secondhand guitar from a neighbor. Using a nickel as a flat pick, she taught the nine-year-old his first chords. "She taught me C and G, a clawhammer G, and I proceeded to drive her crazy," he told Anderson. "I'd sit on the trunk in the kitchen - I'd get up there 'cause I wanted to be on stage, you know. I always wanted to be an entertainer. And I don't have any other memories of ever wanting to be anything else."

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