I grew up in Northeast Arkansas in the little town of Leachville where my first job was picking cotton when I was eight. I learned to play guitar in honky-tonks and roadhouses while I was in college and became interested in songwriting when I was a teenager. I served three years active duty as an officer in the U.S. Navy and have no patience for chicken hawks. After the Navy I attended medical school in Little Rock and practiced psychiatry for thirty-three years before retiring in 2016. I never stopped playing guitar after my dad gave me my first one for my seventeenth birthday (ten dollars at the pawn shop in Blytheville, Arkansas). As a singer-songwriter I perform often with the Little Rock chapter of the Nashville Songwriters Association International and write songs about real life, love and what may lie beyond. Some of my songs are dark, others are funny. I currently play lead guitar and sing with two area bands: Little Rock’s Metrognomes of Love, and the Gene Reid Band, which plays all original songs written by me. Noted author Marvin Schwartz once described my song, "Eternity in Blue" as having achieved, "cult status among Little Rock fans."
My old friend, the poet Red Hawk, waited fifteen years before publishing his first slim volume of poetry, "Journey of the Medicine Man" in 1983. Some of my songs have been waiting even longer. Hawk was nominated for a Pulitzer for his second volume so I decided it’s time to kick out the jams and, as Jimi Hendrix sang, “Get on with it, Baby!”