Chet Atkins

He was born Chester Burton Atkins on 20 June 1924 near Luttrell, Tennessee. His father, James, was an itinerant music teacher, and his mother, Ida, sang and played piano. As a boy he learned guitar and fiddle, playing with his brother, his sister and his stepfather, Willie Strevel. In 1936 he went to live on his father’s farm in Harris County, Georgia, where his father taught him to read music, and late in the 1930s he heard Merle Travis picking on WLW in Cincinnati. Travis played the melody with his index finger against a thumb-picked bass; Atkins built his own version around the thumb and two fingers. His older half-brother Jimmy Atkins, a jazz guitarist who worked in Les Paul’s trio, was an early model.

At eighteen he joined WNOX in Knoxville as a staff musician, fiddling behind the singer Bill Carlisle and the comedian Archie Campbell, until the station’s Lowell Blanchard heard his guitar and began featuring him on the weekday Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round. In 1945 he moved briefly to WLW, and early in 1946 he worked with Johnnie & Jack in Raleigh, North Carolina. In Chicago, Red Foley, leaving the National Barn Dance to host the Grand Ole Opry’s NBC segment, hired him and brought him to Nashville, where around September 1946 he cut “Guitar Blues” for the local Bullet label. At KWTO in Springfield, Missouri, the station’s Si Siman gave him the name “Chet,” and while other officials there let him go for sounding too polished for hillbilly music, Siman kept urging record companies to sign him.

RCA Victor’s Steve Sholes signed him as a singer and guitarist in 1947. His first RCA session, on 11 August 1947 in Chicago, billed as Chet Atkins and the Colorado Mountain Boys, had George Barnes on second guitar and produced “Canned Heat”; in November he recorded in New York with his brother Jimmy on guitar. Those first records did not sell, but Sholes valued his knack for leading other musicians to a commercial arrangement. Back at WNOX around 1948 he worked with Homer & Jethro, and on 3 February 1949 in Atlanta, with Homer Haynes and Jethro Burns, he recorded “Galloping Guitar.” By then he was lead guitarist for Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters: in October 1949 he sang with Helen and Anita Carter at an RCA session in Chicago and, with Anita on bass, cut “Main Street Breakdown.” After a stay at KWTO the Carters moved to Nashville and joined the Opry in 1950, where Atkins also appeared as a solo act.

In Nashville he became one of the session players later known as the “A-Team,” recording behind Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, the Louvin Brothers and Faron Young. RCA issued his first album, the ten-inch Chet Atkins’ Gallopin’ Guitar, in September 1952, and on 20 March 1953 in New York, again with Homer and Jethro, he recorded “Country Gentleman.” “Mister Sandman,” cut on 17 November 1954 at RCA’s Nashville studio in the Methodist Television, Radio and Film Commission building, became his first chart hit in 1955, and a guitar duet with Hank Snow, “Silver Bell,” followed. On 3 September 1955 he added guitar to a Flatt & Scruggs session at Bradley Studios that produced “It Won’t Be Long,” “Gone Home” and “Bubbling in My Soul,” and in 1956 he played on Elvis Presley’s first RCA hit, “Heartbreak Hotel.”

By 1953 he was producing sessions himself whenever the New York-based Sholes could not come to Nashville, and in 1955 Sholes put him in charge of RCA’s Nashville studios, first in the Methodist commission’s building and later at the company’s own studio, which became RCA Studio B. As rock and roll cut into country sales, he, Owen Bradley at Decca, Don Law at Columbia and Ken Nelson at Capitol began backing singers with a neutral rhythm section and replacing fiddle and steel guitar with vocal choruses, the approach that came to be called the Nashville Sound. With the Jordanaires and a rhythm section he made Jim Reeves’s “Four Walls” and “He’ll Have to Go” and Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me” (1958), records that crossed over to the pop charts, and he also produced Eddy Arnold, Skeeter Davis, Bobby Bare and Floyd Cramer. By 1968 he was RCA’s vice president in charge of its Nashville operations. In the 1960s he brought Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton and John Hartford to the label, and in 1965 he signed Charley Pride.

He kept recording under his own name throughout. “Yakety Axe,” cut in April 1965, his adaptation of Boots Randolph’s “Yakety Sax,” became his biggest hit single. He made duet albums with Hank Snow (Reminiscing, 1964, and C.B. Atkins and C.E. Snow by Special Request, 1969), and Sonny Osborne played banjo at an August 1967 session for his Camden album Chet. When the Country Music Association gave its first awards in 1967 he was named Instrumentalist of the Year, and he won again in 1968 and 1969. His name was also on guitars: he began working with Gretsch in 1954, the Chet Atkins hollowbody and solidbody models appeared in the company’s 1955 catalog, and the Country Gentleman model first shipped in 1957.

In 1973 he handed RCA’s Nashville administration to Jerry Bradley and turned back toward the guitar, cutting fewer records as a producer, though Perry Como’s 1973 pop hit “And I Love You So” was one of his. The duet albums continued: Me and Jerry (1970) and Me and Chet (1972) with Jerry Reed, The Atkins–Travis Traveling Show (1974) with Merle Travis, Chester and Lester (1976), which won a Grammy, and Guitar Monsters (1978) with Les Paul, and Reflections (1980) with Doc Watson. The CMA named him Instrumentalist of the Year five years running, from 1981 to 1985. Early in the 1980s he ended his association with Gretsch and took his name to Gibson.

He gave up his RCA executive post in 1982 and moved to Columbia, which issued his first album for the label in April 1983. On Stay Tuned (1985) he played with George Benson, Larry Carlton, Earl Klugh, Mark Knopfler and Steve Lukather, and in 1988 the CMA gave him its renamed Musician of the Year award. Neck and Neck (1990), made with Knopfler, won two Grammys, for “So Soft, Your Goodbye” and “Poor Boy Blues,” and Sneakin’ Around (1992), with Jerry Reed, won another. He shared a Grammy for “Red Wing” with Asleep at the Wheel and others in 1994, won for “Young Thing” in 1995, and took his fourteenth, for “Jam Man,” in 1997. He played at the White House for every president from John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush, and gave a jokey title of his own, C.G.P. (“Certified Guitar Player”), to Jerry Reed, John Knowles, Tommy Emmanuel and Steve Wariner as well as himself.

Atkins died at his home in Nashville on 30 June 2001, aged 77. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him the next year, with Marty Stuart and Brian Setzer presenting.

• 1967, 1968, 1969: CMA Instrumentalist of the Year
• 1973: Country Music Hall of Fame
• 1981–1985: CMA Instrumentalist of the Year
• 1988: CMA Musician of the Year
• 1993: Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
• 1995: Georgia Music Hall of Fame
• 1997: Billboard Century Award
• 2002: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame