PDF Booklet - Stefan Grossman`s Guitar Workshop

CHET ATKINS
RARE PERFORMANCES 1955-1975
“You keep layin’ that thumb in there, son, and you’ll be alright.”
—Uncle Dave Macon’s advice to Chet Atkins
Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
Whenever I hear the early solo recordings of Chet
Atkins, I think of Jones ‘s Trading Post. It was a radio ‘swap
meet’ where everything from old appliances to breeding
stock was bartered on KRHD, a country radio station in
my hometown of Duncan, Oklahoma. Sponsored by a local
grocery store, Jones ‘s Trading Post aired weekday mornings and was the preschool breakfast soundtrack in my
family’s kitchen. The ‘music bed’ under the announcer
offering us neighbors’ old lawn mowers and newborn
puppies was the buoyant thumb and dexterous fingers of
Chet Atkins. No doubt Chet’s friendly ‘home and hearth’
guitar style added to the folksiness of the Trading Post and
helped move its merchandise. It was some years later,
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when I discovered Chet’s early recordings, that I experienced deja vu. I’d been hearing ‘classic Chet’ since early
grade school, and no doubt the subliminal presence of his
music every weekday morning for a decade had an impact
on my later ardor for fingerstyle guitar.
I‘m sure my experience isn’t unique. Many guitar
enthusiasts have doubtless found an old friend in Chet,
thanks to the widespread unauthorized use of his recordings in ways which once wove him deep into the aural
fabric of rural and small town American life. In the 1950s
and 1960s, Chet’s guitar was a ubiquitous sound on local
radio and television advertising across the South, Southwest and Midwest. No doubt Chet wishes he could recoup
‘mechanicals’ (broadcast performance fees) for all those
unlicensed plays. In his autobiography, Country Gentleman
(with Bill Neely, 1975, Ballantine Books, New York), Chet
recalled: “My record of ‘Galloping Guitar,’ which was
recorded in 1947, was used for years as a theme song by a
lot of DJs. The same was true with my record of ‘Main
Street Breakdown.’ It had a lot of notes and fast runs, and
DJs apparently loved it.”
So, too, did lots of listeners to country radio. It was,
in many respects, the medium which mattered most to
Chet, a child of the era when radio was rural America’s
magic link to the larger world and the one which launched
his own career. Yet the video performances here provide
an ultimately sharper portrait of the man who, for generations, defined country guitar, an artist whose personality
is a contradictory blend of relentless drive and defensive
shyness.
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
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1943, Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
Luttrell in eastern
Tennessee. “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. 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, got a Washburn
guitar shortly after Chester Burton Atkins was born on
June 20, 1924. Jim became good enough to start performing
on radio while Chet was still a boy and his success fired his
younger sibling with the desire to do the same.
Chet started strumming 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!) A stint of
early morning milking and a firearms swap earned Chet
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his first guitar, one he recalls as “real cheap, probably
made in Chicago. It didn’t have a name on it.” (Another
early guitar of Chet’s, a Silvertone, is in the Country Music
Hall of Fame.) “That guitar,” he said in his autobiography,
“would absorb almost every moment I could find for it for
the rest of my life.”
Chet’s 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.” Soon Chet was playing
fiddle in a family ensemble led by his guitar-playing
stepfather, Willie Strevel (Chet was six when his musician
father took off, leaving his family with “two milk cows, a
couple of horses and a saddle”), 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 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 he 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....I 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....”
Elsewhere, Chet has admitted his style didn’t take
shape in complete isolation: “Merle Travis is where I first
heard pickin’,” Chet told Dave Kyle (Vintage Guitar,
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Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
Jimmy Doughtery, Chet Atkins, Jack Anglia, Johnny Wright & Marion Sumner
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. When I first heard Merle Travis play [over
Cincinnati station WLW circa 1938], I didn’t know what he
was doing and 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.”
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.
At seventeen, Chet returned to east Tennessee to seek
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Chet Atkins & Merle Travis Photo courtesy Merle Travis Estate
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 Swingera 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 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. He worked a couple of
months early in 1946 for Johnnie Wright and Jack Anglin
on WPTF in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he was billed
on shows as ‘Chester Atkins and His Talking Electric
Guitar.’ But a long-shot at the big-time soon beckoned:
Chet had heard that Red Foley would be replacing Roy
Acuff on the Opry’s immensely popular Prince Albert
Tobacco segment. 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, Chet (or ‘Ches,’ as Foley called him) was
with him.
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.
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Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
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Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
After a brief stint at
Richmond, Virginia’s
WRVA’s Old Dominion
Barn Dance, Chet went
to Springfield, Missouri’s KW-TO (Keep
Watching The Ozarks),
where booking agent 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. The peripatetic
Chet was in Denver working on radio station KOA in
August 1947 when 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.) 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. 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
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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.
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 he was in the company of ‘Homer’
Haynes and ‘Jethro’ Burns, with whom Chet later worked
as producer at RCA. When Homer and Jethro moved on to
Springfield’s KWTO, Chet stayed in Knoxville, backing
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
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Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
who had spent the better part of the 1940s chasing radio
jobs from the Great Smokies to the Rocky Mountains. Fred
Rose promised Chet session work (he was on many of
Hank Williams‘s later recordings and the early ones of the
Louvin Brothers), and there were the Opry broadcasts,
where he worked 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. In 1952, Chet officially became A&R assistant
to RCA’s Sholes, a capacity which linked him to the earliest
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(1955) RCA recordings of Elvis Presley. Chet was increasingly active as producer – he was promoted to RCA’s
Manager of Operations in Nashville in 1957 – but he also
recorded many of his best guitar sides during this time.
The 10-inch LP, Gallopin’ 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
for Gretsch through 1979.
1955 is the point at which our video collection begins.
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!”
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THE PERFORMANCES
Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
“I look at those old films now,” Chet told John Schroeter
(Fingerstyle Guitar, July/August 1995) regarding performances like those which open this collection, “and I think
I was kind of ahead of my time...for that time, I was pretty
good. And I could play with confidence. I see that now and
think, how did I do that? Look at those young fingers! Look
at that tight skin! What happened? But I didn’t realize it at
the time. I remember thinking that I was so bad – if I could
only play like Django Reinhardt or Les Paul!” Of course,
guitarists around the country were watching such performances and thinking,“If only I could play like Chet Atkins!”
The first performance here from 1955 is a wonderful
period piece with Ernest Tubb towering over Little Jimmy
Dickens and Jean Shepard, one of country music’s reigning queens in the mid-1950s, providing classic crinoline
country girl atmosphere. The song introduced (in honor of
Shepard) as “Jean’s Tune” is in fact “The Poor People of
Paris,” a song associated with Edith Piaf and popularized
in this country by Les Baxter and his Orchestra. Chet is
picking a new CA 6120, his first signature model Gretsch
that appeared in late 1954. “I went up to Brooklyn and
signed a deal with them and we came up with an orange
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Gretsch,” Chet told Dave Kyle (Vintage Guitar, August
1995). “I had some input, like a steel bridge and a zero fret
instead of a nut. I think Mr. Gretsch—a colorful guy, I
loved him – came up with the color. It was radical at that
time. I don’t think there ever was an orange guitar before.
Worked out well; we sold an awful lot of those things. I
was starting to get a lot of play on the radio, was becoming
popular in a small sort of way.”
The performance demonstrates Chet’s tasteful use of
the vibrato bar, a tool which enabled him to emulate the
fluid pitch shifts he heard from steel players and one
which first came into his playing around 1943. A drummer
named Herbie Fields told him about it and ordered one for
Chet. “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.”
“Side By Side” is a 1927 vintage song popularized by
vaudeville singer-guitarist Nick Lucas and revived in 1953
by Kay Starr. Chet’s performance is a tour de force suggesting the influence of Les Paul and Merle Travis yet
tastefully arranged in a way which is uniquely Chet.
Another wonderful 1955 period piece finds Chet in the
role of master accompanist to Anita Carter, who clutches a
bouquet of roses and keens “Makin’ Believe.” The song,
penned by country singer-songwriter Jimmy Work, was a
# 2 chart hit that year for Kitty Wells. It has been frequently
revived (Emmylou Harris enjoyed a Top Ten hit with it in
1977.) Chet invests the wistful melody with sweet, piquant
fills in his solo spotlight.
Chet’s two performances from the Ozark Jubilee in
1958 find him back in his old Springfield, Missouri haunt
and exemplify his relaxed trademark sound. “Villa” is
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Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
Chet Atkins with Homer and Jethro
from the 1907 operetta, The Merry Widow.”Say Si Si” is a
1940 Xavier Cugat hit further popularized by the Andrews
Sisters. Note Chet’s deft use of his thumbpick as plectrum.
Watching his left-hand voicings here, a jazz guitarist remarked, “He’s the best ‘double-stop’ guy I’ve ever heard.”
From the Ozarks to Norway is quite a leap, but wherever
he went, Chet took Tennessee with him. The 1963 Norwegian concert, in which he’s accompanied by a very ‘closeto-the-vest’ quartet including longtime session stalwart
Henry Strzelecki on bass, opens with “Levee Walking.”
Note Chet’s beautiful use of harmonics. “Now Chet, he’s
got the world skinned on that [harmonics],” Merle Travis
once said. “He can hit a chord that’s half harmonics.” Chet
cites the influence of steel guitarists in his desire to master
this technique.
The song he introduces as “the national anthem of east
Tennessee” was also one that earned Chet his first major
applause as a performer when he was ten, “Wildwood
Flower.” Chet remembered being surprised to hear the
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Carter Family recording, since he had learned it from East
Tennessee musicians. Maybelle Carter is on record as
saying, “My grandmother knew that song,” and “Wildwood Flower” seems to be a folk synthesis of a couple of
Victorian-era ‘parlor songs,’ “I’ll Twine Midst the Ringlets” and “The Pale Amaryllis.” Chet plays it first in the
old Maybelle Carter ‘thumb-brush stroke’ style, then develops the tune harmonically and finally picks it in his
characteristic assertive yet relaxed fingerstyle.
“Yes Ma’am,” performed without the quartet, is a
wonderful solo which is a mite like “Windy and Warm.”
Having breezily moved from purest country to bluesy
sounds, Chet next sets his sights on the guitar’s motherland, Spain, with “Malaguena.” While malaguenas are an
authentic flamenco genre, the well-known “Malaguena” is
actually a 1948 composition from the co-writer of “Say Si
Si,” Cuban-born pianist-bandleader Ernesto Lecuona. Chet
makes an understated tour de force of it, again effectively
exploiting his skill with harmonics.
The medley of two folk songs, “Greensleeves and
Streets of Laredo,” shows the depth of Chet’s arranging.
There’s beautiful counter movement in the voicing of
“Greensleeves,” and a wonderful bass line in “Laredo.”
Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
1964, Chet Atkins with Andres Segovia
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For all the neo-classicism of this performance, Chet isn’t
above nailing a bass note on the sixth string with his thumb
if need be. Segovia would be shocked, but such country
pragmatism was endorsed by Merle Travis, who likened
his approach to a guitar neck to “grabbing a hoe handle.”
From the sublime to the ridiculous, Chet enlists his band
to vocalize on “The Peanut Vendor,” a 1932 vintage pseudoLatin tune once performed, strange as it seems, by Judy
Garland in A Star Is Born. Chet hints at, among others, Bo
Diddley in his bag of licks here.
When Chet introduces “Tiger Rag” as an old New
Orleans tune, he’s not kidding. This goes back to 1917 and
the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. As an encore, Chet’s
performance is aptly hot.
A decade later, Mr. Guitar returned to the Land of the
Midnight Sun to perform on Norway’s Nashville Cavalcade
program. The opening classical guitar piece, “Alhambra,”
shows Chet’s stylistic range. His interest in classical guitar, ironically, dates to the time he was accompanying
Maybelle Carter and her daughters. “Ezra Carter, the
Carter Sisters’ father, gave me three volumes by Pascual
Roch, Modern Method for Guitar, around 1949 or 1950,”
Chet told Don Menn. (Roch was a student of Francisco
Tarrega.) “He [Carter] was into all kinds of things. I don’t
know how he became interested in classical guitar...But he
had those books, and he gave them to me.” Chet made
good use of them. However, Segovia would hardly approve of Chet’s thumbpick!
“Black Mountain Rag” is best known today as a
flatpicker’s favorite, thanks to Doc Watson, but Chet recorded the driving fingerstyle rendition he performs here
for RCA in 1952. Atypically, he plays this in open G (D-GD-G-B-D) tuning. Fiddler Curly Fox had enjoyed a hit with
the tune in 1947, and his accompanist was pioneering
Kentucky fingerpicker Mose Rager, one of Merle Travis’s
boyhood inspirations.
The first of two medleys from this Norwegian outing
opens with “Windy and Warm,” a tune John D. Loudermilk
wrote for Chet which had become a folk fingerpicker’s
favorite in the 1960s, thanks in part to Doc Watson’s
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Chet Atkins & Maybelle Carter. Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
recording of it. “Back
Home in Indiana” is the
sort of pop chestnut for
which Chet has always
had a soft spot and
which he always invested with a warm
glow. “Country Gentleman” is his sprightly
1953 original, co-written
with Boudleaux Bryant,
which became Chet’s
theme. “Mister Sandman” is, of course, the
1955 Chordettes’ hit
which, as an instrumental, also became Chet’s
first chart hit that year:
it made it to #13 on
Billboard’s country
chart. We hear another “Wildwood Flower” and, finally,
Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” closes this medley of
‘picker’s delights.’
The second medley reflects the successes of Chet
Atkins, producer. RCA made him a vice president in 1968,
the year a Harper’s Magazine piece said of Chet: “Though
Chet Atkins calls himself ‘just another hunched-over guitar player,’ this 44-year-old native of rural Tennessee is
probably the most influential music man in Music City.”
Atlanta journalist Paul Hemphill visited the busy executive and wrote in The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and
Country Music (Simon and Schuster, 1970, New York) of
“Atkins’s office, which is highlighted by a boomerangshaped velvet sofa and a nude statue carved from rare
Philippine wood and an ashtray engraved TO CHET—
THANKS – TRINI (Trini Lopez had been in town to record
an album, ‘Welcome to Trini Country’).” None of this was
evident in Norway, naturally, but the fruits of Chet’s
production labors inspired a medley of songs he produced.
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Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
The first tune in
the medley is “The
Three Bells,” a phenomenal hit for the
Browns in 1959.
Their recording
was ten weeks at
#1 on Billboard’s
country chart and
four weeks # 1 on
the pop chart!
(They don’t make
hits like that anymore.) Edith Piaf
popularized the
song in the 1940s,
though the Browns
learned it from a
recording by Les
Compagnons de la
Chanson. Chet reportedly believed
so strongly in the
version he produced for the
Browns that he
flew to New York and offered RCA an ultimatum: “Either
you promote this song or you lose Chet Atkins.” Happily,
everyone came out a winner.
“I Can’t Stop Loving You” may be best remembered
for Ray Charles’s 1962 version, but Chet produced the
original for Don Gibson, the tortured genius singersongwriter who credits Chet with saving his career. 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. 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.’”
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Jim Reeves, Anita Kerr & Chet Atkins
Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
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, 19581978), “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.”
“Java” is the catchy Allen Toussaint tune which became a million seller for trumpeter Al Hirt in 1963. Despite
Chet in the producer’s chair, the tune didn’t even graze the
country chart. The same, of course, can’t be said of Jim
Reeves’s “He’ll Have to Go,” which was # 1 for an astonishing 14 weeks in 1959. (The song was three weeks at #2
on Billboard’s pop chart.) Reeves also popularized “Four
Walls” in 1957. Colin Escott has called it “The first great
Nashville Sound record.” Of that sound, Chet told Dave
Bussey in 1973: “I wasn’t trying to change the business,
21
just sell records. I realized at that time you had to surprise
the public and give them something a little different.” He
succeeded with “Four Walls,” which offered an intimate
vocal sound from Reeves and a prominent choral presence
by the Jordanaires. A perfectionist, Reeves made Chet do
double duty. “It was a lot of stress on me,” Chet told
Bussey, “because I had to run back and forth to the control
room, but Jim liked my guitar sound and wanted me to
play the introduction and the bridge.”
“When You’re Hot You’re Hot” was a 1971 #1 hit for
Chet’s longtime pickin’ partner, singer-guitarist Jerry Reed,
who affectionately calls Chet the Chief. Finally, Chet
closes this medley of songs he produced with the Don
Gibson classic, “Oh Lonesome Me.”
Prone to dismiss his production skills, Chet told John
Schroeter that his success as producer comes in part from
his common background with his audience. “I’ve always
been kind of square,” he said. “If I like a song, the public
will usually like it, too. That was a great advantage. If I had
been a jazz player and detested everything but jazz, I’d
have been a flop. When you hear something and think,
‘That’s clever. I wish I’d written that,’ that means it’s good.
I never second guessed things.”
Following the ‘producer’s medley,’ we hear the
sprightly “Just Another Rag,” which suggests the influence on the Chief of protégé Jerry Reed. “Missionera,”
with its hints of “Malaguena,” is a composition by South
American guitarist Jorge Morel. It’s a fine example of
Chet’s formidable right hand in action. Finally, Chet’s
second Norwegian interlude closes with “Wheels,” a buoyant country fingerpicker’s favorite which made the pop
Top Ten in 1961 in a recording by The String-A-Longs.
Now Chet returns to Nashville for the last two performances. Having seen him in action with various Gretsch
Chet Atkins models and classical guitars, it’s interesting to
see him deliver “Muskrat Ramble,” a 1926 tune popularized by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, with a Martin
Dreadnought. Despite the legendary stiffness of such
instruments, Chet manages to elicit a signature vibrato
tone (sans Bigsby bar) in this 1973 performance. Closing
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this collection is a 1975 rendition of Don McLean’s wistful
1972 hit, “Vincent.” The neo-classical voicings again demonstrate Chet’s knack for harmonically rich arrangements.
And subtly, he shows off a new technique here, a
downstroke brush with the back of his nails. On second
thought, it isn’t new at all: isn’t that a sophisticated variation of the old Maybelle Carter ‘thumb-brush stroke’ lick?
Yes, put to fresh use showing Chet as master of reinvention, an artist who lets nothing good go to waste from his
rich life of passionate engagement with the guitar. “The
thumbpick made me what I am today,” Chet told Kevin
Ransom (Guitar Player, October 1994). “It’s taken me all
over the world and made me a wonderful living. I never
thought that would happen to a guy like me, because I
come from so far out in the sticks you wouldn’t believe it.”
— Mark Humphrey
Photo courtesy Chet Atkins Collection
23
Few names are as synonymous with the guitar as
that of Chet Atkins. He set
the standard by which generations of country fingerstyle guitarists have been
measured. But his influence
transcends regions and
genres. The sound of 20th
century guitar would not be
the same without the impact
of this gentle genius, who
was at the height of his
influence and creative powers when the performances
presented in this video were
captured.
The much traveled “Mr. Guitar” is seen playing in this video
collection everywhere from Nashville to Norway. His signature Gretsch
Tennessean guitar, on which Chet made exquisitely effective use of its
Bigsby vibrato bar, is heard in all its sweet, reverb-laden glory on
many of these clips. But Chet, whose versatility embraces all styles of
guitar, is also seen playing a classical guitar and a Martin dreadnaught.
No matter what he plays, the sound produced becomes a distinct
auditory fingerprint of the man known in Nashville as C.G.P. (Certified
Guitar Player). The relaxed mastery evident in this video explains why
Chet, along with such diverse geniuses as Thelonius Monk and Bill
Monroe, was honored in 1993 with a Lifetime Achievement Award
Grammy “For this 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.”
PURINA S HOW, 1955: The Poor People Of Paris, Side By Side, Makin'
Believe • O ZARK J UBILEE, 1958: Villa, Say Si Si • N ORWAY, 1963:
Levee Walking, Wildwood Flower, Yes Ma'am, Malaguena, Medley:
Greensleeves/Streets Of Laredo, Peanut Vendor, Tiger Rag • N ORWAY
(NASHVILLE CAVALCADE), 1973: Alhambra, Black Mountain Rag,
Medley: Windy & Warm/Back Home In Indiana/Country Gentleman/
Mr. Sandman/Wildwood Flower/Freight Train, Medley: The Three
Bells/I Can't Stop Loving You/Java/He'll Have To Go/When You're Hot
You're Hot/Oh Lonesome Me, Just Another Rag, Mr. Bojangles,
Misionera, Wheels • Porter Wagoner Show, 1973: Muskrat Ramble
POP G OES THE C OUNTRY, 1975: Vincent
Running Time: 58 minutes • B/W & Color
Duplicated in SP Mode/Real Time Duplication
Nationally distributed by Rounder Records,
One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140
Representation to Music Stores by
Mel Bay Publications
® 2001 Vestapol Productions / A division of
Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop Inc.
VESTAPOL 13027
ISBN: 1-57940-904-0
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