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Chet Atkins to Bob Anderson, Pickin Vol. 6, No. 2 March 1979 One of the most striking things about the architects of the Nashville Sound is that their music has stood the test of time so well. Chet Atkins is one of those architects. The works of Chet Atkins have remained in print to touch era after era of music lovers with their freshness, spark and inventiveness. Known as "Mr. Guitar," Chet Atkins is the most recorded solo instrumentalist in music history. As a studio musician, his string-tickling work has gilded the records of Elvis Presley, Kitty Wells, The Everly Brothers, Hank Williams and dozens of other Nashville legends. His style influenced such pop greats as Mark Knopfler, Duane Eddy, George Harrison, The Ventures, George Benson and Eddie Cochran, as well as thousands of country pickers. He has won nine CMA Awards as Musician of the Year, four Playboy jazz poll honors and thirteen Grammies, more than any other artist in the history of country music. As the head of RCA Records, he propelled an entire generation of country stars to fame -- Dottie West, Waylon Jennings, Bobby Bare, Porter Wagoner, Dolly Parton, Jim Reeves, Jerry Reed, Skeeter Davis, Charley Pride and Eddy Arnold were all signed and/or produced by Chet. He built RCA Studio B, said to be the most hit-generating studio in the history of Music Row. The name of Chet Atkins is synonymous with The Nashville Sound. 
By his own account, he's been playing guitar more than six decades now.
There are exceptions aside from Chet, of course, but
precious few guitarists enjoy 40 year long careers not ones that anyone much
notices, anyway. In the course of those four decades, Chet has managed
to contradict most of our prevailing stereotypes surrounding legendary
guitarists. A self-described square, he has never lived a particularly
bohemian lifestyle, despite a few 1960s photos of him sporting a natty
goatee. He has not, since his 1940s radio days, lived in anything resembling
poetic poverty. (Being a child of the Depression-era South, the poetic side
of poverty is generally lost on Chet, who once knew what it was to go to bed
hungry.) Obviously, he did not die young. He did not play himself
to death (Charlie Christian), succumb to foul play over a woman
(Robert Johnson), or OD (Jimi Hendrix). Nor has he manifest, at least
to the extent that it's become apparent to his public, the neuroses or ego
eruptions often evident in large talents of long standing. Given all these
strikes against him in the legend trade, we can only assume that Chet has
become legendary by dint of working hard and long without, considering
his relaxed demeanor, letting it show.
It isn't a contradiction that takes much explaining if you have known bright people who, like Chet, have 'bootstrapped' themselves up from rural poverty and minimal education. Chet's glib reply to interviewer Don Menn's query as to how he originated his solo style (Guitar Player, October 1979) bespeaks pride undercut by tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation: "The style I play is an accident," he said, "because I was so far out in the damn sticks I didn't know any better." 
The sticks to which Chet refers were near the town of Luttrell
in East Tennessee's rural Union County,
north of Knoxville amid the Great Smoky Mountains.
"Luttrell was a whistle stop on the Southern
Railway," Chet recalls in his autobiography, "with a post office, pool hall,
barbershop, greasy spoon restaurant and general store..." It was
two-and-a-half miles from there his parents, James Arley Atkins and
Ida Sharp Atkins, raised corn, tobacco and five children in a 'holler' on
a fifty-acre farm which had been in the Atkins family for generations, perhaps
since 1780 when Atkinses came there with the county's early settlers from
the British Isles.
James' firstmarriage produced a son and daughter. Second wife
Ida bore him three children: Lowell, Niona, and on June 2O, 1924,
Chester Burton Atkins.
Wanderlust overtook Chet's father, a piano tuner, music teacher, and evangelistic singer, when Chet was six; "James left his wife and their brood with two milk cows, a couple of horses and a saddle", Chet told Hurst. Chet's childhood was grim, marked by asthma and other illness. I remember malnutrition, Chet told Chet Flippo (Rolling Stone, February 12, 1976). I remember being hungry. I said to myself as a kid, I'll never be that way again. But the redeeming grace of his impoverished youth was the music which was the home-made entertainment in the east Tennessee holler where Chet grew up. Most everyone played or sang, and Chet naturally joined in. When you're a kid, he told Nash, you want to be like your idols, and my idols were my father and my brother, so they inspired me to play music. Music ran in the family: Chet's grandfather, Wes Atkins, made and played fiddles. His father, James, was a music teacher, piano tuner, and singer for itinerant evangelists. (He liked to perform "Ave Maria" with trilled Rs.') Chet's half-brother, Jim, was given a Washburn guitar shortly after Chet's birth, and it was a source of infantile fascination to the future CGP (Certified Guitar Player, Chet's self-be-stowed degree). "I idolized Jim when he sat and played," Chet wrote in his autobiography, Country Gentleman (with Bill Neely, Ballantine Books, New York, 1974). "When he wasn't playing it, I touched it a lot, rubbed my fingers lightly over the top, savoring the silky varnish, and picking at the strings ever so lightly. The steel strings felt cold and magical to my small fingers." 
Chester heard the records of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family and started
plunking a ukulele when he was five. He recalls a guitar he
abused by "tying a string to it and dragging it through the yard and filling
it with dirt." By the time he was nine, he could do more with the instrument
than drag it and was ready for one of his own. (He already was playing fiddle
on a poorly repaired instrument once struck and shattered by lightning!)
His interest in guitar was piqued anytime a visitor appeared with one.
People had started to dread bringing a guitar to the house, Chet wrote
in his autobiography. In moments I was all over them...My nose was always
about three inches from the bridge of every guitar I saw being played for
the next few years. And his eager attention soon bore dividends: "By the
age of seven or eight," Chet wrote, "I knew most of the major and minor
first position chords."
Chet's fixation on the guitar was excited further by a childhood visit to the big city of Knoxville, twenty miles to the south. "There I saw a blind man playing a guitar on the street," he recalled in his autobiography. "I can still see him, with that old, beat-up guitar and a tin cup tied close to the pegs. I can even hear the coins drop into the cup. When we got home, I told Mother, I wish I was blind and had a guitar. That's how much I wanted to play." Intent on a guitar of his own, a nine-year-old Chet schemed to assume his brother Lowell's hated morning milking chores in exchange for a .22 rifle which he swapped (along with his own .30.30 deer rifle) with their stepfather, Willie Strevel, for a guitar. "It was a milestone in my life", Chet wrote, "that guitar would absorb almost every moment I could find for it for the rest of my life." In time, he would also play a Sears Silvertone his stepfather got (along with $15) in trade for a Model T. That guitar, fitted with a saddle a 14 year old Chet made for it, is now in the Country Music Hall of Fame. 
But it was actually the fiddle that launched Chet's entertainment career.
His Uncle Joe brought him one on a visit from Nebraska, and Chet was soon
playing at the home-based Saturday night country dances which are now
a thing of legend, the kind of house party where the carpets were rolled
up and the furniture shoved out of the way. Soon Chet and his brother
Lowell were good enough to play at a school assembly and
first significant performance experience came at the age ten:
he played "Wildwood Flower" for an appreciative audience of 200 of his fellow
school children. Their applause was medicine for a shy kid who felt, he later
wrote, that "everybody hated me because I was ugly and retarded.... The
applause gave me much more confidence in myself than anything ever had."
"I knew, at ten years old,
that this was where I had to be", Chet wrote, "out on some stage, or
anyplace in front of people, playing the fiddle or picking the guitar".
Soon Chet was playing fiddle in a family ensemble led by his guitar-playing stepfather, Willie Strevel and the group performed at East Tennessee school houses and tourist camps. Chet's first earnings as a professional musician were $3 and some watermelon. Ill-health, particularly asthma, plagued Chet in his childhood. He became so frail when he was eleven that Chet's mother wrote his father, then living in Georgia, to say their son was dying. Convinced a change of climate would cure him, James Atkins brought his son to live on his rural farm 22 miles north of Columbus, Georgia. Chet missed the community music-making which was such a pervasive part of life in east Tennessee, but Chet credits the isolation of his life in Georgia with freeing him to explore a new style: "I began to experiment picking the guitar with my fingers instead of a hard pick," he wrote in Country Gentleman. "It felt natural, and since there was nobody around to teach me anything else I began, little by little, to develop a finger-pickin' style....! might not have developed it as quickly if I had stayed in east Tennessee, where there were so many people to influence me, and where everybody played with a plectrum...." 
It wasn't unusual then for string players to play a variety of instruments.
What was exceptional was Chet's determined attitude at an early age,
and a decision he reached at fifteen: he decided to concentrate on guitar,
having heard that most great violinists start by age seven. Chet decided
he had begun too late, so from then on his every free waking moment, after
classes and between chores, was devoted to guitar. "I knew at 14 or 15 that
the finger style would be the one I'd use for solos," Chet told Bob Anderson.
"I threw my straight pick away and I'd get a toothbrush handle and make a thumb
pick out of it. I just play rhythm and bass with the thumb and melody with the
first three fingers. It's an imitation of a two-beat piano player."
The boy was drinking in music wherever he could, watching James Atkins teach piano, and listening to a homemade radio. He could pick up Les Paul's Trio from New York, which included Jim Atkins on rhythm guitar, and enjoyed hearing Chicago jazz guitar ace George Barnes. One night in 1938, through his radio came Merle Travis. "Merle Travis is where I first heard pickin'," Chet told Dave Kyle (Vintage Guitar, August 1995). "There were some people before him that influenced me, like the guy that used to cut my hair. He could play 'Spanish Fandango' on the guitar, which was a finger-pickin' piece. Then I heard a record of a guy named [Charlie] Stump that did some finger-pickin' on an old Edison record." 
It was circa 1938 Chet managed to catch a few broadcasts
(when conditions were right ) of Merle Travis via Cincinnati's 50,000 watt
radio station WLW.
His syncopated thumb and index finger guitar style,
broadcast live over WLW in Cincinnati, changed Chester Atkins' life.
"He certainly stimulated my imagination as to what
could be done with a guitar," Chet wrote, but the fact that he only heard
Travis sporadically (and never saw him play while teaching himself)
contributed to Chet's unique variations on Travis picking.
"It wound up great because I didn't know what the hell he was doing,"
Chet told.
"I tried to imitate him and it wound up to be different. I play more of
a stride piano style and he plays more of a 4/4 beat type of thing."
"I thought he was playing with three fingers,
so I started playing with three fingers. As it turned out, the style
I played was sort of a pseudo-classic style, with the hands in a slightly
different position."
The sounds of Travis, George Barnes, and brother Jim Atkins, who appeared on the WLS National Barn Dance along with Les Paul, came to Chet's isolated Georgia outpost via radio. Chet would stay up listening and practicing each evening until midnight. When he was fifteen, Chet got a summer job with the National Youth Administration and from it earned enough money to electrify his guitar. "I ordered an Amperite pickup for my guitar," he told Don Menn. "It was basically just a coil of wire and a magnet that you clamped to the back of the bridge." He also ordered a PA system, and the newly-electric Chet became a sensation around Columbus, Georgia. 
The fiddle, however, earned Chet his first significant employment in the
medium that mattered most in those days, radio. A seventeen-year-old dropout,
Chet found work as fiddler for comic Archie Campbell and singer Bill Carlisle
on Knoxville's 10,000 watt WNOX in 1942. When America entered WWII later that
year, Chet was given a 4-F deferment due to chronic asthma. His guitar playing
came to light informally, and station executive Lowell Blanchard offered Chet
a feature spot on the Mid-Day Merry Go Round. Blanchard encouraged Chet
to learn as many kinds of songs as possible, telling him, "You're gonna make
it big someday, Chester, and you'll need every song you can get." Blanchard
even gave him a key to the station so
his insatiable appetite for
music continued in his off time as he spent hours at night and on weekends
in WNOX's music library
listening to all types of music. For the first time he heard classical guitar
virtuoso Andres Segovia and Les Paul's idol, Belgian gypsy jazz guitarist
Django Reinhardt.
"My brother (Jim) started sending me air checks
of their performances so I could play and copy Les Paul's choruses,"
Chet told Dave Kyle (Vintage Guitar, Vol. 9 No. 11, August 1995).
"There were some transcriptions of George Barnes at the radio station and
I'd copy and memorize some of his choruses; 'It Had to Be You', things like
that."
At seventeen, Chet returned to east Tennessee to seek work at Knoxville radio station WNOX, which had once launched Roy Acuff. (A high school dropout, Chet would later award himself a fictitious degree, C.G.P., Certified Guitar Player). Chet was hired as a fiddler to accompany comic Archie Campbell and singer-comedian Bill Carlisle. When Chet's guitar skills came to light, station manager Lowell Blanchard gave him a solo spot on the 'Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round' on the 10,000 watt radio station. "What a debt I owe that guy," Chet would tell interviewer Jim Ohlschmidt (Acoustic Guitar, May/June 1993). "I would listen to all the pop tunes that were out, everything, and try to think of something I could play - how in the world could I make it interesting for two minutes." The station's staff guitarist was drafted, and Chet (4-F on account of chronic asthma) stepped in and quickly learned more Swing-era standards as a member of the staff band, the Dixieland Swingsters. He worked three years at WNOX before setting his sights on Travis's old radio home, Cincinnati's 50,000 watt WLW. 
It was during his three years at WNOX that Chet woodsheded extensively and
broadened his repertoire in a way that paved the path for his countrypolitan
style in subsequent decades. It was also during his WNOX days that
drummer named Herbie Fields told him about vibrola, later known as the
vibrato or whammy bar, and ordered one for Chet.
A 1943 photo shows Chet with a Martin C-2 archtop on which
he had added the earliest of many such devices which became trademarks of
his style. This tool
enabled him to emulate the fluid pitch shifts he heard from steel
players and one which first came into his playing around 1943.
"I put it on my guitar and I loved it," Chet recalled. In the 1950s,
he would modify the vibrato designed by West Coast inventor Paul Bigsby.
"I bought one," Chet told Kyle, "but I couldn't use it because the handle
was in my way. I couldn't play any pizzicato notes, I couldn't play
'Country Gentleman' with it because I deadened the strings a little."
With the aid of some coiled steel, a vise and a hammer, Chet altered it
so "it's bent down under the bridge so I can play pizzicato notes...
The vibrato rests under my little finger, the end of it, so it's handy when
I need it. It's right there."
When he turned 21, Chet was nudged out of the WNOX nest by his mentor, Lowell Blanchard, who felt it was time his young charge test his style at a more powerful station. Chet agreed and spent some six months at Travis's old station, WLW. It was there Travis himself first heard his foremost disciple in action. "The first time I heard him really turn loose was in about 1945," Merle recalled in 1979. "I'd been in the Marine Corps a short while and I was going back to Cincinnati to visit friends. It was a cold morning.... Well, Chet Atkins was on the radio at the time on WLW in Cincinnati, and I was listening to the radio and the announcer said, 'Now we'll have a guitar solo from Chet Atkins.' He started playing, and I pulled the car over it was snowing like everything and sat there and listened to him, and I thought, 'Wow!'" In his autobiography, Chet remembered Merle coming to the station at this time and saying things like: "I can't play the guitar. Not like you can, Chester." And while the man for whom 'Travis picking' was named might have jealously guarded his primacy in the field, Merle was always effusive in his praise of Chet. "I don't think that there will ever be a chance for another guitar player to be as great as Chet," Merle once told this writer. "He was born at a time when turn-of-the-century music, the songs of the 1920s and big bands, were still around and not laughed at. He knows it all, from that music...to what was recorded this afternoon in Nashville. He is the greatest guitar player that has ever been on this earth, in my opinion. I don't think there will ever be anyone greater. And that's what I think of Chet Atkins." 
Despite Travis's admiration, Chet was fired from his WLW job on Christmas Eve,
1945.
"Audiences weren't nearly as sophisticated as they are now," Chet explained to Dave Kyle
when asked about being fired. Back in those days, there were a lot of songs
about death and looking for a soldier's grave and all these terrible
bloodcurdling songs... I didn't do any of that stuff. I played guitar and it
sounded like two bad guitar players, I guess, so I didn't do very well at
keeping a job."
The next four years of Chet's career bear witness to that. Sometimes Chet was
fired, and sometimes he chose to seek greener pastures. From WLW he bounced
to WPTF in Raleigh, North Carolina, where "Chester Atkins & His Talking
Electric Guitar" backed Johnnie Wright and Jack Anglin,
then to Chicago where he not only heard Django in person,
but landed a job with singer Red Foley that would be replacing
Roy Acuff on the Nashville's
Grand Ole Opry in April 1946 as host of the show's Prince Albert Tobacco
Chet, emboldened both by Travis's encouragement and his ardor for Leona
Johnson, the woman he would wed, (one of a pair of singing twins on WLW),
struck out for Chicago to audition for Foley. And when the WLS National
Barn Dance veteran debuted on the Opry on April 13, 1946, his spots
featured a solo by Chet (or 'Ches,' as Foley called him).
As "Chester Atkins", he made a record, "Guitar Blues," produced by
Owen Bradley for Nashville-based Bullet Records.
Chet was two months shy of his 22nd birthday, earning $50 a week and enjoying
a solo spot on the show. His glory, however, was short-lived: the ad agency
sponsoring the Opry segment ordered Foley to drop his guitar solo.
Chet could
have continued as Foley's Opry sideman, but chose not to. In four years
of radio experience, Chet had worked his way to country's top show, only
to walk away from it.
His cross-country trajectory over the following year included stops at Richmond, Virginia's Old Dominion Barn Dance over station WRVA, KWTO (Keep Watching the Ozarks) in Springfield, Missouri where booking agent Si Siman took an active interest in Chet's career. Si Siman reportedly became the first person to call Chester Atkins "Chet". Siman saw great promise in the shy guitarist and recorded him on station transcription discs. He sent them as 'demos' to record executives, including Steve Sholes, who heard Chet as a potential RCA 'answer' to Merle Travis, then enjoying hits for Capitol like "Divorce Me C.O.D.", novelty songs augmented by catchy fingerstyle guitar. Unfortunately Siman wasn't the last word at KWTO. His bosses, unhappy with Chet's smooth playing, fired him. The peripatetic Chet was in Denver working on radio station KOA in August 1947 when Siman struck pay dirt: Jean Aberbach of the Hill and Range music publishing company called on Sholes's behalf: "Was Chet interested in recording for RCA?" He answered in the affirmative. He also answered "yes," though perhaps with less conviction, when asked if he wrote songs and if he could sing. (He could do both, but his talents lay elsewhere.) 
A week later, on August 11, 1947, Chet made
his first recordings for RCA in Chicago on a Gibson L-10 acoustic (now
on display in the Country Music Hall of Fame) which his brother Jim
had given him and which had once belonged to Les Paul.
Rhythm guitarist was gifted Chicago jazzman
George Barnes.
It wasn't Chet's
first recording session - he had recorded for the Nashville-based Bullet
label during his brief Opry stint, and as early as 1944 as a sideman
to WNOX artists Pappy Beaver and the Birchfield Brothers for Capitol.
But Chet's recording of Jenny Lou Carson's "Ain'tcha Tired of
Makin' Me Blue" launched an association which would last until 1982 and
yield over 70 RCA studio albums.
Those early RCA sides were edgy and exciting. His first recorded instrumental, the furious "Canned Heat," reflected the Travis influence, with "The Nashville Jump'"s chord melodies displaying his own ideas. Late 1947's "Dizzy Strings," a tantalizing amplified performance, shows him fusing the Travis style with tough, A fluent single-string melody lines. His vocal recordings didn't sell, but Chet's virtuosity was gradually gaining notice. Impressed by his eight-side August session, Sholes called Chet to New York in November for further recording. One of the songs cut was "My Guitar Is My Sweetheart": "Oh, my guitar is my sweetheart As faithful as can be; I put her on my knee And sing a lovely melody. When lights are low, She won't say, 'No.' Oh, my guitar is my sweetheart She's as faithful as can be."Though written by David Rhodes and Alfio Bargnesi, it seemed autobiographical of a man who has often fallen asleep with a guitar in his hands and has written: "I would lean on it for the love I never seemed to have enough of and for the friendships I didn't always find." 
Steve Sholes's faith in Chet did not make him an overnight success.
In desperate need of work, by 1948 he was back where he had started in radio
in 1942 - on Knoxville's WNOX, this time with a wife and infant daughter in tow.
He worked awhile with two fellow
Djangophiles: guitarist Homer Haynes and mandolinist Jethro Burns,
musicians who hid their penchant for swing-era jazz behind cornball comedy -
thew were better known as comics Homer & Jethro.
Homer & Jethro, with whom Chet later worked as producer at RCA, backed him on
many of his 1949-1953 RCA recordings. Though he sang less on records, his
vocal on the 1949 "Telling My Troubles to My Old Guitar" has a relaxed charm
as he urges Jethro to "tell your troubles to your mandolin, son!" Homer and
Jethro wound up signed to RCA, soon, to be renowned for their smart parodies
of country and pop hits. Their instrumental talents helped Chet capture a
Djangoesque feel on many of his late '40s records, including the exhilarating
"Galloping on the Guitar" and "Main Street Breakdown."
When Homer and Jethro moved on to Springfield's KWTO, Chet stayed in
Knoxville, backing
Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters,
led by original Carter Family member (and country thumbpicking guitar great)
Maybelle Carter and her daughters June, Helen and Anita.
He must have felt he was backtracking when they, too, moved on to KWTO,
and he tagged along. It was there George Moran, visiting Springfield
to make transcriptions for Martha White Flour (best remembered for its
sponsorship of Flatt & Scruggs), returned to the Opry with glad tidings
about Chet Atkins and the Carter Sisters. He praised them as "one of
the best acts in country music." The Opry beckoned, and in June of 1950,
Chet, his wife Leona and daughter Merle arrived in Nashville with
the intention of settling there. It was the last stop for a man who had
spent the better part of the 1940s chasing radio jobs from the Great
Smokies to the Rocky Mountains.
Chet moved into a different Nashville from the one he had left in 1946.
During the interim, the future Music City had begun to develop as a hub
of country recording activity. Previously, much recording was scattered afar:
Dallas and, perhaps surprisingly to some, Los Angeles were both popular
country recording centers in the 1940s. From 1947 through 1949, Chet's RCA
sessions took place in Chicago, New York City, and Atlanta. But when he
returned to Nashville in 1950, he found not only employment on the Opry but
opportunities as a session musician.
He backed Hank Williams on the 1952
session which yielded both Jambalaya and the portentous "I'll Never Get Out
of This World Alive",
played on hits by Webb Pierce, was prominent on the Carlisles'
"No Help Wanted" and some
of the Louvin Brothers' early hits, and made frequent guest appearances
on the Opry broadcasts with the Carters.
Chet quickly involved himself not only with performing and recording but
with rounding up musicians and organizing sessions for Steve Sholes,
Fred Rose, and Decca's Paul Cohen.
"It was my most productive time," Chet said of the early 1950s to John Schroeter (Fingerstyle Guitar, No. 10, July/August 1995). "I was ignorant, but I played with a lot of authority and energy." The 'authority and energy' of Chet Atkins was widely apparent in his 30th year, 1954. Chet Atkins, a curious mixture of insecurity, tenacity and talent, was fast becoming a major player in country music on several levels. In subsequent decades he would be both praised and blamed for the 'countrypolitan' blend heard on records he produced for Don Gibson and Floyd Cramer, among many others. But few people outside Music City then knew or cared about the production phase of his career. Chet was Mr. Guitar, a talent Minnie Pearl acknowledged when he first played the Opry in 1946 with a peck on the cheek and the encouraging words: "You're a great musician and you're just what we've been needing around here." In time, even Chet Atkins had a hard time living up to his own reputation. One of his favorite anecdotes involves an impromptu performance he once gave aboard a cruise ship. Picking informally in the bar while the lounge guitarist took a break, Chet's anonymous solo act was given this critique by one of the passengers: "You're good, but you're no Chet Atkins!" 
It was during this time Chet's friendship with RCA
executive Steve Sholes led to his expanding role in A&R for RCA Nashville.
Chet was hired to manage the McGavock Street facility and to oversee RCA's
day-to-day operations in Nashville. New Sholes signee Elvis Presley arrived
there in 1956. Chet played on "Heartbreak Hotel," the singer's history-making
RCA debut. The record's massive success cemented RCA's commitment to
Nashville and to Chet. It put Tree International on the map as a publisher. It
created a pop culture revolution and in one stroke made the term "Music City,
U.S.A." a reality. Chet Atkins went on to perform on such Presley hits as "I
Need Your Love Tonight," "A Big Hunk of Love," "I Got Stung" and "A Fool
Such as I."
He also led the sessions for another major act of the teen revolution, The Everly Brothers. In fact, Chet was the duo's champion in Nashville for years before the hits came. He took Everly songs to Kitty Wells and Anita Carter when the brothers were still in high school. He got the Everlys their first recording contract. And he was with them in the studio when they created the 1957-62 tunes that would eventually make them members of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, including "Bye Bye Love," "Wake Up Little Susie" and "All I Have to Do Is Dream." 
In early 1957 Sholes promoted Chet Atkins to RCA Manager of Operations.
Chet's first order of business was convincing the label that it needed to build its
own office and studio. Located at 17th and Hawkins (now Roy Acuff Place),
RCA Studio B was the first permanent record-company office on Music Row.
It is the building that spearheaded the music industry's migration to Nashville.
Although Mercury Records and Capitol Records had set up small outposts
earlier, it was this move by Chet and RCA that began Nashville's march to
worldwide fame as a recording center.
Chet struck pay dirt in the new facility instantly by producing Don Gibson's
double-sided 1958 smash "Oh Lonesome Me"/"I Can't Stop Loving You." Some
historians cite this disc as the first true Nashville Sound recording.
After some initial hard country failures, Gibson
told journalist Dale Vinicur: "Chet said, 'Don, there's nothing else
we can do unless you want to do it a little more modern, take out the
steel completely and add voices and do it like that.'"
One December 1957 session which utilized this approach rendered two major
hits for Gibson, "I Can't Stop Loving You" and "Oh Lonesome Me." Though
"I Can't Stop Loving You" is the song that's been more revived (five
different versions made the country charts, 1958-1978), "Oh Lonesome Me"
was #1 for eight weeks in 1958 and was the biggest hit of Gibson's career
as an artist. "I Can't Stop Loving You" was the B-side of "Oh Lonesome Me,'
and gradually made it to #7. "Chet was very quiet, very easy in my sessions,"
Gibson told Vinicur. Chet added: "I'd say, 'What do you want me to play,
Don?' And he'd hum some little lick and give me an idea and it was great
because it was nothing I would ever think of."
Thanks to Chet's production, Gibson was one of the first exemplars of a new 'countrypolitan' sound which became Nashville's alternative to the rock'n'roll scourge that was ominously eroding the popularity of traditional country music. Chet Atkins and his peers were crafting a country song to sophisticated arrangements with cool strings and background vocals. It was an "uptown" approach, aimed at broadening country's sales appeal to pop consumers. Yet it was also unmistakably casual and almost folksy, marked by the camaraderie of an "A Team" of pickers who worked out "head" arrangements together. 
Chet also took
over the production of three established RCA stars, Eddy Arnold, Hank Snow
and Jim Reeves, bringing all three men to stupendous new levels of success and
eventual election into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Besides them Chet helped shape the recording careers of a host of memorable artists
including the Browns,
Skeeter Davis, Floyd Cramer, Willie Nelson, Charley Pride, Waylon Jennings,
and Dolly Parton, to name a few.
Inspite of increasing of Chet's activity
as producer he also recorded many of his best guitar sides during this time.
The 10-inch LP, "Galloping Guitar", appeared in 1954, the first of dozens
of albums Chet waxed for RCA. Chet's reputation as a guitarist was going
national, and Gretsch representative Jimmy Webster convinced him to design
and endorse an electric guitar, the Gretsch CA 6120. It debuted in 1954,
and was the first of many models Chet endorsed and helped design for Gretsch
through 1979.
In 1960's Chet Atkins' performing career was heating up. He appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960 and performed for President Kennedy in 1961. He had a top-10 country instrumental hit with "Yakety Axe" in 1965. A book was written about him in 1967. By then, he was unquestionably the best known country guitarist on earth. His guitar course, his Gretsch endorsement, his high visibility in the media and his capacity for hard work paid off. He had become the most visible and influential guitarist of his time. By the mid-1960's Chet was producing twenty-five acts simultaneously for RCA, as well as maintaining his own performing and recording career. He signed the legendary Charley Pride (1966) and Jerry Reed (1967) and produced the early singles that brought each to fame. He signed Waylon Jennings in 1965 and produced more than fifteen of the superstar's top-20 hits during the next five years, including "Only Daddy That'll Walk the Line," "Yours Love," "Mental Revenge" and "Brown Eyed Handsome Man." In 1965 he produced "Green Green Grass of Home" for Porter Wagoner, creating a country standard. He signed Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter and Charlie Rich, all of whom were to achieve later stardom. He also signed, but did not produce, Connie Smith (1964) and Dolly Parton (1968). 
Chet attracted a wide diversity of talent to RCA's studios in the 1960's, including
pop crooner Perry Como, trumpeter Danny Davis, Bonanza TV star Lorne
for the magic touch of The Nashville Sound. Comedian Don Bowman summed
it all up in his 1964 single, "Chit Akins, Make Me a Star." In 1968, Chet Atkins
was promoted to an RCA vice-presidency.
The Nashville Sound, along with the promotional efforts of the Country Music Association (founded in 1958), "saved" country music during the artform's darkest days. It was not only a commercial style, but a handy marketing term that the media was quick to use. By the late 1960's, reporters from national magazines were making regular pilgrimages to Music Row and the first country music books were being published. Almost all of the writers were smitten by the easy-going country congeniality and awesome musical abilities of Chet Atkins. 
By the 1970's he was producing less, but still with enough vim to guide the
massive 1970-71 Jerry Reed pop crossover hits "Amos Moses" and "When
You're Hot You're Hot." Just as Steve Sholes had helped him, Chet brought
along a new generation of RCA producers, notably Bob Ferguson, Felton Jarvis
and Jerry Bradley. His later contributions to the RCA roster included Ronnie
Milsap, Guy Clark, Dottsy, Tom T. Hall, Dickey Lee, Gary Stewart, Steve
Young, Ray Stevens and Steve Wariner, Chet's last RCA protégé, one of the
most consistent hitmakers in modern country music.
Chet further confounds our stereotype of guitarists by having been nearly as influential and innovative as a producer as he has been as a picker. Guitar players just don't become record company moguls, as Chet was for nearly three decades at RCA. "In Nashville," John Grissim wrote in 1970, "Atkins is Numero Uno. Everybody knows him, or recognizes his name. He's Mr. Guitar or Mr. Nashville or Mr. Country Music or whatever. The local Cadillac dealer personally buys him fresh cigars and hand-delivers them. Atkins wins celebrity golf tournaments. He gets invited to all the official openings...and he's constantly in demand for television appearances... Chet Atkins is low key, urbane, thoughtful, well read and as dry as a Saltine cracker.... He has a twinkle in his eye, the kind that tells you Chet Atkins has a lot more fun than you think he does." (From Country Music: White Man's Blues by John Grissim, Paperback Library, New York, 1970). That fun has generally centered around the guitar. The instrument was Chet's ticket out of rural poverty and obscurity, and his ticket has always been close at hand. I feel very uncomfortable when I don't have it with me, Chet told Alanna Nash (Behind Closed Doors: "Talking With the Legends of Country Music, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1988). It's like I left home without my shorts on or something. Many is the night," Chet says, "that he's fallen asleep with a guitar in his hands." His skill with the instrument not only made Chet famous, it made him an across-the-board role model for younger players who have taken something of Chet into widely divergent fields. Chet's rock-based admirers have included everyone from Scotty Moore, Elvis's original guitarist, to George Harrison and Mark Knopfler. His fingerstyle jazz disciples included Lenny Breau and Earl Klugh. There was a time, perhaps 30 years ago, when Chet was probably the world's best-known (and, by inference, influential) guitarist. 
Although increasingly less interested in the pressures of being a label executive,
Chet continued to play with breath-taking virtuosity. As an artist, he embarked
on a series of collaborative LPs, working with Lenny Breau, Jerry
Reed, Hank Snow, Doc Watson, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops,
Django Reinhardt and Chet's Grammy-winning LP
collaborations with Merle Travis and Les Paul.
These were highly acclaimed and reaped a heap of awards.
In 1974, he published his autobiography, Country Gentleman. In 1977
he ended his association with Gretsch and went on to
develop his own model for Gibson Guitars.
From 1967 to 1988, Chet Atkins won the CMA's Instrumentalist of the Year eleven times and became the Country Music Hall of Fame's youngest inductee in 1973 (Chet was then 49). In 1993, he earned a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS): "For his peerless fingerstyle guitar technique, his extensive creative legacy documented on more than one hundred albums, and his influential work on both sides of the recording console as a primary architect of the Nashville sound." 
That point was underscored by the Country Music Foundation's William Ivey:
"Atkins's career is unique," Ivey wrote in The Stars of Country Music (Malone
and McCulloh, ed., Avon Books, New York, 1975)
"...Every stage in his
development as a musician has been matched by an increased impact on the
business side of music." Chet has thus possessed an opportunity afforded few
artists, that of consistently imposing his personal interpretation of county
music upon a major corporation (RCA) and upon many significant country
entertainers, among those for whom he produced major hits, including
Don Gibson, Jim Reeves, Waylon Jennings, Floyd Cramer, and Jerry Reed.
Chet made somewhat the same point to the Chicago Tribune's Jack Hurst:
"See, I was different (from the other Nashville producers)," he said.
"I played a guitar. I made a lot of record royalties (as a recording artist)
back in those days. My royalties got up over a million dollars."
He's won 13 Grammys (not counting
his 1993 Lifetime Achievement Award), nine Country Music Association Awards
for Instrumentalist of the Year, the Academy of Country Music's Pioneer Award,
and multiple readers poll honors from Guitar Player, Playboy, and other
publications. (Guitar Player dubbed Chet Popular Music's Most Influential
Stylist. Life ranked him sixth among the 100 Most Important People in the
History of Country. )
At the 1999 groundbreaking for Nashville's new
Country Music Hall of Fame, he led a country guitar marching band.
His acclaim was achieved without ever appearing astride a horse strumming a guitar, the approach of the 1930s Western guitar hero, or ever duck-walking with one, let alone smashing or immolating an instrument. It was a fame based in country music but which easily transcended generic boundaries. His recorded music is strictly pop, wrote John Grissim. As a product, his records are purchased by consumers whose record collections include LPs by the Norman Luboff Choir, Ray Conniff, Henry Mancini... 
Chet has groused that his recordings were made quickly and half-assed at home
in the basement, but their sales were anything but half-assed and
bolstered his power base in Music City. Both praised and blamed for
his contribution in the 1950s to a more polished country production style
usually dubbed the Nashville Sound, Chet down plays his role in it:
"I told somebody the other day that I didn't think I d contributed a hell
of a lot," Chet remarked to Alanna Nash. "I knew a good song when I heard it,
and I knew when to keep my mouth shut and let the artists and musicians come
up with good arrangements, and occasionally I came up with a suggestion
or two. But I think just about any good musician could have done that.
I was just lucky. I was in the right place at the right time..."
Primed for a new chapter in his creative life, Chet gave himself a "degree"
in 1983. It is Certified Guitar Player and he
began signing his name as "Chet Atkins, c.g.p." Leaning increasingly toward
pop-jazz, Chet issued "Work It Out With Chet" (1983), "East Tennessee Christmas"
(1983), "Stay Tuned" (1985), "Street Dream"s (1986), "Sails" (1987),
"Chet Atkins C.G.P." (1988).
Chet's 1990
release of Neck &
Neck is a duet CD with Dire Straits leader Mark Knopfler. He reunited with
Jerry Reed for an instrumental CD in 1992, "Sneakin' Around".
In defiance of commercial country's trend toward ever-younger acts, Chet
released "Read My Licks", an album which features duets with artists
from jazz (George Benson), rock (Mark Knopfler), and country (Steve Wariner)
in 1994, his 70th year.
New generation of performers has lined up to collaborate with the legend. They
include country singer Suzy Bogguss, former Toto bassist David Hungate,
champion fiddler Mark O'Connor and jazz greats Larry Carlton
and Earl Klugh. Chet is Emmylou Harris's banjo teacher.
As a producer, Chet Atkins continued to do occasional work with acts such as
South African balladeer Roger Whittaker and radio star Garrison Keillor. He
appeared frequently on the latter's Prairie Home Companion show and
remained a popular concert attraction, often appearing with symphony
orchestras. He also starred in his own Cinemax cable-TV special, A Session
with Chet Atkins, C.G.P. In 1987 Chet introduced an instructional video, Get
Started on the Guitar, which has since outsold all other home videos of its type.
Thanks to the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society, he has become the subject of
an annual four-day Nashville convention featuring admirers from around the
world.
Given the fact that he is well past having anything
to prove artistically or needing the money, we can only assume that Chet keeps
recording because he still has a passion for playing. Looking to the day when
that passion is finally silenced, Alanna Nash asked Chet how he would like
to be remembered. "To answer your question," mused Chet, pondering his
self-said epitaph, "I guess I'd like for people to say I played in tune,
that I played in good taste, and that I was nice to people. That's about it."
And so, it comes full circle. In 1939 Chet Atkins longed to pick like Merle Travis. On August 11, 1947, Chet Atkins, his unamplified Gibson L-10 archtop acoustic guitar in hand, recorded his first two RCA sessions at their Chicago studios. Within five years, he singlehandedly put country guitar on the map, his records inspiring guitarists in all fields. His taciturn personality belied a guitar style bold and fearless, mixing polish, introspection and passion whether he played electric or acoustic. His own guitar heroes Merle Travis, Django Reinhardt, Les Paul and Andres Segovia had similar passions and daring. Chet routinely tinkered, unafraid to try new musical ideas or sounds, melding them into an instantly identifiable style that blossomed and broadened over the next few decades. From 1949 to the present, plenty of kids yearned to play like Chet. Though in his autumnal years, he and his legacy remained a valued, vibrant touchstone that continues to inspire countless guitar greats: Vince Gill, Paul Yandell, Mark Knopfler, Brian Setzer, Steve Wariner and many more who will take that legacy into the 21st Century. It's a monument to the triumph of a poor East Tennessee kid who loved music, wanted to make a difference, and did beyond his wildest dreams. SOURCES: If you like this site you may support it with a small donation: |
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