More Cowbell! Top Ten: Amos Moses (#4)

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Happy Friday, everyone! And most of us in the US get an extra hour this weekend! If that won't make you bang a cowbell, then maybe this countdown of my favorite songs that feature a cowbell (inspired by the SNL skit) will help. Here's the next song on my list. #4: Amos Moses - Jerry Reed When you think cows, you think...well, farms, country living, and country music. Yet this is the only country song on the countdown...and it isn't really all that country. This is more along the lines of CCR meets Tony Joe White. The late Jerry Reed, one of this year's inductees into the Country Music Hall of Fame, was a masterful guitar player. In fact, the third thing Chet Atkins ever said to me was after examining a photo of Reed and Merle Travis hanging on the wall of the reading room at the old Country Music Foundation: "That's a great picture." I just slobbered because Chet Atkins said something to me. Didn't help my guitar playing any! Atkins and Reed were good friends. In fact, they shared a Grammy award for their 1970 album Me & Jerry. In addition to guitar, Reed was also a banjo player (he played banjo on a few Homer & Jethro records [side note: Jethro Burns also played banjo]) and sang bass as a backup singer on some of the sessions he played on before he struck gold on his own. And son! When you're hot, you're hot! Reed was incredibly hot for a time, not just as a session musician and a singer (and a songwriter: he wrote "Misery Loves Company," which was Porter Wagoner's last #1 song, as well as a Johnny Cash top three hit "A Thing Called Love" [which was also a top 30 hit for Jimmy Dean...and no relation to the John Hiatt composition that Bonnie Raitt covered]), but he also dabbled in acting. His best-known role was that of Cletus "Snowman" Snow in the Smoky and the Bandit films. Of course, he also sang many of the songs used in the films. Here the cowbell bangs in the background as Reed delivered the story of Amos Moses Milsap, a one-armed ("left arm gone clean up to the elbow") Cajun who made his living illegally trapping alligators. Using his less-than-idyllic upbringing ("everybody blamed his old man for making him mean as a snake, when Amos Moses was a boy his daddy would use him for alligator bait") to know the details of Louisiana swamp survival, he made it out while the sheriff did not ("well, I wonder where the Louisiana sheriff went to, you can sure get lost in the Louisiana bayou"). Another interesting thing is this was one of the earlier country hits to use the word "hell" in a "casual" tone. I mentioned Jimmy Dean earlier, and many may know that Dean had to re-record the ending of "Big Bad John" to say, "At the bottom of this mine lies a big, big man," because the original closing line was, "At the bottom of this mine lies one hell of a man." That wouldn't make it past the censors in 1962. Eight years later, Reed got away with it. He was a hell of a man, just like Amos. Amos Moses Written by Jerry Reed Hubbard Recorded by Jerry Reed From Georgia Sunshine, 1970 They raised up a son who could eat up his weight groceries: