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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, 2

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 3

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 4

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, 5

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 6

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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. 8

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 10

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 11

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 12

(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 14

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 15

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 16

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 18

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. 19

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.’” 20

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 22

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

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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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