Gateways: How Jerry Reed’s East Bound and Down Gave My Family a Generational Love Language

Welcome to our Gateways column, where Paste writers and editors explore the taste-defining albums, artists, songs or shows that proved to be personal “gateways” into a broader genre, music scene or an artist’s catalog at-large—for better, worse or somewhere in-between. Explore them all here.

Stars reflected off rain puddles in the driveway like neon lights bouncing off a cityside river as Papaw and Dad labored over assembling my Pinewood Derby car in the garage. Dad was especially stoked on it, filing the wooden body into a shape mirroring his own Camaro Z28 parked out back. I was in Cub Scouts but on the precipice of quitting midway through fashioning together a leather wallet. Like many things in my life, the Scouts were a brief, fleeting phase I never really grew into but quickly grew out of. I don’t remember much about my short tenure in the organization, other than that meetings were a good way to spend a Wednesday and I never earned any badges (I did, however, drag my mom to the local army and navy store and beg her to buy me the whole Scouts ensemble).

But in that garage, with a mercury light zapping moths above a too-big door that, during the summertime, was never shut, I watched the only two men in my life argue and sweat over a tiny wooden car that would, eventually, not win a single race at the derby but take home an award for “best paint job,” or something of the like. The building was the size of a country barn, Papaw having built it years earlier to store his semi-truck on off-days. When I came to it at the turn of the millennium, heaps of scrap metal filled out shelves too tall for me to conquer. A mattress hung from the wall on industrial chains. There was a rusted-out, locked cash register from God knows when—maybe 300 years ago—on a desk. Near the telephone, Papaw kept a board full of keys. What did any of them unlock? Your guess is as good as mine. I spent hours staring at those keys, imagining what doors had spent so long awaiting their return.

The smell of paint fumes was thick as fog, as rows of John Deere tractors—most of them in parts—lined up like soldiers, shimmering green like Coke glass and sopping wet with licks of grease not yet dry. Near the dumpster out front, I’d nimbly balance atop railroad ties split by a cocktail of gravel and weeds, like a ballerina burning electric purple as the town’s heat melted summer. Sometimes, I’d peer through the side door—where the paint had been peeling off—and stuck my head into a crack, listening to Dad and Papaw speak the proverb of Miller Lite zealots, as they made “bitch,” “motherfucker,” “goddamnit” and “shit” sound like the kind of poetry I was never meant to hear.

That was the summer Papaw installed a new speaker-system in the ceiling, and you could hear the music two towns over—or from the picnic table in my parents’ backyard next door, which was the same distance away from me. That was where I heard the voice of a Georgia angel for the first time, as a chooglin’ country tune poured out of the stereo and barreled through the open, oil-stenched air like an IV drip. It was as if the whole world went quiet in that moment, and the air conditioner fell silent, all of the leaks dried up and the way Dad and Papaw’s mouths, once sharp like knives unraveling into each other over the slightest inconvenience, had grown inexplicably dull. They tapped their work boots in-between doses of spray paint; stood closer to each other than normal.

I was too young then to have the hindsight to pay attention to the disc-jockey’s banter for a song title or an artist’s name. Back then, country music sounded good but it was not yet something I wanted to remember. Nothing was. In their house, my grandparents used the same black, cube-shaped stereo my entire life. Mamaw always had it on to fill the deafening quiet of her and Papaw’s patio, as she’d sit in there for hours every day while her husband tinkered 50 feet away. The whole room was made out of windows and we all lived on the only highway in town. When you’re that young, you live each day like no one else’s life exists if you’re not in it and, sometimes, I’d walk in Mamaw’s house and catch her zoning out on the road—her mind having been fixating on the traffic and the neighbors across the way for God knows how long.

I’d forgotten about that Georgia angel quickly, until we met again one Sunday when I was seven, maybe eight years old. Back then, Papaw would let me ride with him across the county as he ran errands. Those moments were special to me, because they often involved him dusting off his old Ford pickup and taking it out for a spin—and I loved that boat-sized thing and its detachable hatch. The truck had this big, obtusely-coiled stick-shift with a rounded knob, and I used to obsess over watching Papaw switch gears with it. I can remember sometimes taking my GameBoy Advance along for the trip and playing Madden 06 as we sped off down the highway towards some other town that felt an entire state away but was, realistically, maybe only 15 minutes east at most.

Papaw often liked to make those drives in silence but, on his good days, he would turn the radio to K-105 FM, the Warren-Youngstown area’s longtime country station that would, sometimes, take a break from the poppy stuff and play some golden oldies—the latter being my preference. Papaw knew I was into that kind of thing, as I often danced and sang to the songs on the radio in his garage while he took apart and repaired tractors, or boogied on the patio while Mamaw cooked beef stew dinners in the kitchen. I can’t remember where we had been or where we were going, but that Georgia angel came singing through the speakers in a flash. “You took all the ramblin’ out of me, girl, with the finest lovin’ I ever done seen,” he sang with a cacophony of voices behind him. “Now all I wanna do is sit home and play my little guitar, and sing songs about all the places that I’ve seen.” You’re listening to K-105 and that was Jerry Reed singing “You Took All the Ramblin’ Out of Me.” That sentence, uttered by a DJ whose name I’ll never remember, is a molecular part of my aging, imperfect soul.

Papaw never sang along to songs, and I don’t think he ever smiled once when I wasn’t around. He wasn’t an “I love you” guy but, in the nearly seven years since he passed away, my parents have often reminded me that I was the “light of his life.” And I think that, beyond their obligation to say that, such a thing is probably true. Papaw overcame his fear of the ocean to save my Cleveland Indians cap from being snatched away forever by a tide when I was a toddler. When I started showing a propensity for tinkering like him when I was barely five, he bought me my own (child-sized) Craftsman tool box—adorned in a cherry red enamel and packed with all of the screwdrivers and hammers a pair of eager hands like mine could ever want. But, when I grew up a little and became a precocious elementary student who wanted to start a band like their deceased eldest son once had many years prior, he and Mamaw bought me a drumkit and let me beat the hell out of it at their house. He was good to me and not many other people, so I was lucky for that.

So when “You Took All the Ramblin’ Out of Me” came on the radio that one time, it was immense yet Papaw didn’t crack a grin over it. He didn’t sing or smile nor pay much mind to it at all, really. And he didn’t go off on his own and buy me a Jerry Reed CD or anything to commemorate the occasion. Instead, he bought me a tractor and never taught me how to drive it. Music, in my family, was a way to fill the space—never was it meant to be some kind of lifeline. Of course, I didn’t know then that I would, one day, write about music, and I sure as hell didn’t know I’d do it for a living. In retrospect, the countless hours I spent drawing album covers for my imaginary band while watching American Idol episodes was probably a bit of heavy foreshadowing. But Papaw died while I was in college and never got to see me actually put my affinity for music to good use.

I grew up in a household marred by OCD, PTSD and, likely, a touch of ASD. That meant a lot of affirmations were left undelivered and a lot of harsh, uncomfortable circumstances were avoided, but it also meant that my father—and myself, years down the line—lived a life consumed by habits. In more inflammatory, destructive instances, Dad was a stubborn alcoholic and a copious snuff user. But, in the lighter hours, his TV-viewing pleasures were firmly and affectionately cyclical. Just like how the Zenith television set in Papaw and Mamaw’s house had only three channels, my dad was a marquee practitioner of watching the same handful of programs over and over and over again on weekends when he was home from work. This is how my childhood language was sharpened by Sanford & Son, Happy Days and The Brady Bunch re-runs on TV Land and Burt Reynolds movies—particularly The Longest Yard, The Cannonball Run, Deliverance and Smokey and the Bandit, the latter of which was, when I was growing up, an especially wet dream for syndicated broadcast companies.

Even now, as I’m knocking on the doorstep of my 26th birthday and I don’t know a single other person my age who has seen Smokey and the Bandit, the 1977 movie is on regular rotation in my watch history. At this point in my life, I particularly love the film’s anti-cop stance (the Confederate flag on the Bandit’s license plate, certainly not so much), music and the effortless chemistry between Burt and his co-star, Sally Field. But, when I was just a giddy kid who didn’t mind aimlessly watching hours of car auctions with my father, I was sure that a piece of my existence was made possible by Burt Reynolds cruising around in a black Pontiac Trans Am and “blocking” for a semi-truck bootlegging Coors Beer from Texarkana to Atlanta in a hot pursuit.

While I especially fancied Burt back then and my queer sexual awakening was seeing him naked on a bear-skin rug in Cosmopolitan for the first time, I think it was the energy Smokey and the Bandit radiated that made it so crucial to my well-being—as it arrived to me just as the energy that filtered through Papaw’s too-big garage door had. Maybe that energy came from the Southern accents, or maybe it came from the way Mamaw always talked about bell-bottom jeans, or maybe it came from my dad’s longtime, Burt-style mustache—which he grew in 1981 and hasn’t shaved off since—or maybe it came from that centerpiece semi-truck, which looked a lot like the one Papaw kept in his garage for two decades.

But the real star of Smokey and the Bandit, for me, was the guy driving that semi-truck: Cledus Snow (aka the “Snowman”), and his basset hound, Frank. Some years on, maybe when I was in my pre-teens and discovered IMDB for the first time, I’d learn that Snowman was played by a Grammy Award-winning musician named Jerry Reed and that “East Bound and Down,” the film’s theme song that carries on over and over throughout the runtime, was sung by him (along with other tracks, like “The Legend” and “The Bandit”). In an instant, everything clicked into place and, each time “East Bound and Down” came on, my dad (who was likely always laying on the couch, resting his eyes yet refusing to give up the remote) would tap his foot along to Reed’s singing—just exactly as I had witnessed him do when “You Took All the Ramblin’ Out of Me” came on the radio while he and Papaw were building my Pinewood Derby car—it felt communal, transportive. He’d even sing some of the melody, particularly the “We’ve got a long way to go, and a short time to get there” line, as if it meant something beyond just being a B-movie’s catchy theme song.

While my dad is not a country music fan in any regard, I myself have never gone through a specific, tangible phase of loving the genre so much for a meteorically short period of time like many of my friends have—and that’s likely because it’s been a focal point of my life since I was born. There’s a VHS tape of me, in a Woody from Toy Story costume, singing Alan Jackson songs someplace; my first concert was a Brad Paisley set at the Canfield Fair when I was far too young to be exposed to noise as loud as that; when I would awake from a nightmare, my mom would rock me back to sleep by singing “You Are My Sunshine”; on my 16th birthday, when I got my first turntable, Papaw and Mamaw gave me my first record: their original 1968 vinyl copy of Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison. So, naturally, I came to Jerry Reed’s East Bound and Down through a sensical discovery that was, really, just in my atoms already via my dad’s incessant TV-watching patterns.

The album was a unique entry in Reed’s catalog—as it wasn’t an official studio release but a compilation that merged all of his cuts from the Smokey and the Bandit soundtrack with throwaway covers of tracks by Andy Kim, Leiber and Stoller, Waylon Jennings and Bob Dylan (though his take on “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” is a merry and sublime reimagining of Dylan’s heartbroken classic). East Bound and Down‘s obscurity gets hammered home even further when you realize it’s on streaming but devoid of a Wikipedia page. In recent years, I’ve found myself really infatuated with “The Bandit,” a time-worn ballad that still feels so detached from a song of his like “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot” or “I Shoulda Stayed Home.” “The Bandit” is balmy, gentle and tender. “Bandit, you’re reckless, and you live much too hard,” Reed croons on the track. “Bandit, you’re the joker in the deal of the cards. You’re a legend to the old man, a hero to the child. Bandit steal a lady’s heart with only a smile.” A verse like that’ll convince you there’s real technicolor in this world, make you remember what it’s like to make-out with a runaway bride or catch stars reflecting off of a rain puddle for the first time.

My dad and I always shuffled through films we loved together, but the ones that remained true were American Graffiti and Smokey and the Bandit—both of which, coincidentally, largely revolved around cars. As he and I grew further and further apart from one another through the sands of adulthood, it once made less and less sense that we found a mutual love through those two flicks. I can’t change my oil, nor do I have a lick of interest in ever learning how—and the thought of a televised car auction has long made my stomach turn.

But now, I’ve finally started to understand why Smokey and the Bandit and Jerry Reed’s music, especially, has endured in our vocabulary. Much like how I quit Cub Scouts once its magic wore off, I, too, became less curious about what I could pull out of the guts of that Craftsman toolbox after I discovered the power of re-runs and Carter-era cinema with Dad. But wherever I go, there Jerry Reed is. Thus, he is the bridge that, perhaps unknowingly but still miraculously, disrupted the silence that lingered between me, my father and my grandfather. Reed was our North Star, our grand, expanding nebulous; the cord that existed between our bruised hearts, the rhythm beneath our tapping feet. Like the song “You Took All the Ramblin’ Out of Me” goes: “All I wanna do is sit home and grow old with you.” As long as there’s an East Bound and Down, then grow old with the only men I’ve ever loved I shall.

My relationship with Reed has blossomed into a cosmic one—though, maybe it always was cosmic. I didn’t immediately connect the dots at the moment but, when I bought Grand Theft Auto: V for the first time, it was near the third anniversary of Papaw’s passing—which hit during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. As I sat in my bed, which was stationed in the same bedroom Papaw died in, I toddled around the Los Santos map and aimlessly committed crimes, as a GTA player often does. But, while cruising the highway at night like I was in a freewheeling dream, I caught the game’s built-in country radio station at just the right time and “You Took All the Ramblin’ Out of Me” began to play. And, perhaps, I’m inclined to buy into that being some inexplicable moment of Papaw saying “I love you” from the great beyond or nowhere at all. Or maybe it was just a video game algorithm doing its thing. I don’t know.

What I do know is that, when I returned to my parents’ house for the holidays last December from my own shoebox apartment in Columbus, I sat on the patio for an hour and watched the traffic pass by while my dog enjoyed the open space by chasing a few of her toys around. It was just as quiet then as it had been 20 years earlier, maybe even quieter, and it was there that a memory came back to me for the first time since I lived it. On a boiling July Sunday, before Papaw and Mamaw’s house became my parents’ house, I was 10, maybe 11, and watching a NASCAR race with Mamaw. I poured over that old Zenith television set in a room with shag carpeting, red bakelites in the ceiling and an all-leather bar in the back corner. The only thing separating us from the patio was a set of batwing doors and a wood-paneled room built for a hot tub that hadn’t been used in 20 years (and a room that now, in 2024, has a shelf with my Pinewood Derby car and “best paint job” trophy on it).

I was cheering on my favorite driver, Jimmie Johnson, and chewing on the end of one of Papaw’s old pipes while making a crayon race car with one of those Crayola GadgetHeadz Car Factory toys (that I picked out of a JCPenney Christmas catalog), as Mamaw crocheted a blanket on the couch behind me. And, just as the race was nearing its end, I remember hearing Papaw come inside from the garage—and I could smell his coveralls stinking of elbow grease and sweat. Then, while far out of my view in another room, he began whistling while washing up. Come to think of it now, it sounded a lot like the melody of an old Jerry Reed tune he might have heard in that Ford pickup of his.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.