Mister Guitar - Chet Atkins

 

Slinkey

Mister Guitar

Chet Atkins

Produced by Chet Akins

Recorded in Nashville

Recording Engineer: Bob Farris and Bill Parker

RCA Victor LSP-2103

1959

From the back cover: This album is something in the way of a homecoming for Chet Atkins. Home is Luttrell, a small town fashioned among the steep mountains and rocky land of East Tennessee. The songs he plays, like the instrument itself, are a part of that background, where the land is poor and the people poorer, but where, as Chet says, "almost everyone you meet on the street can play you a six-string chord."

There, among these lean and independent men, the guitar is a hallowed instrument. The reason is relatively simple. Not only has it a firm place in the local folk traditions, but it is a cheap instrument – in fact, the cheapest one with full range. To this day the pawnshops around the Grand Ole Opry are lined with used guitars, and all it takes is an extra ten dollars (or eight, if you're a born haggler) to launch a musical career.

The Atkins people have lived in this part of the country since 1800. Chet's grandfather was a storekeeper and a union man, an amateur musician who fashioned hand-made fiddles for his sons. As a boy Chet was fascinated by both the guitar and the fiddle but his first instrument was a ukulele. "Didn't have the money for strings," he says, "but when one busted I'd just get a wire off the porch screen and put it right in there. One day my mother asked me to fetch some water from the well. I didn't pay much attention and she busted the thing over my head," he says. "Now that wasn't a nice thing for a mother to do."

But despite the maternal discipline, the guitar had an important place on the Atkins farm. Both Chet's father, an itinerant piano teacher who subscribed to magazines like Etude, and his older brother Jimmy (a fine musician in his own right who now manages a Denver radio station) played the guitar.

As a young boy Chet made two important decisions: the first was that he would be a musician instead of a farmer, the second that he would play the guitar instead of the fiddle. "I had that ambition even then," he recalls. "I was poor from a real scrubby farm and I didn't like it. So I played the guitar. It was my way of getting out."

That he did play the guitar and he did get out is now a matter of record. Chet spent the next ten years traveling throughout the South and Midwest, inevitably hiring on at some radio station as staff guitarist and inevitably getting fired ("I couldn't wiggle or sing, all I could do was play the guitar...") before coming to the Opry in 1948. There, without wiggling or singing, he has built a massive reputation as a great guitarist, a reputation already so permanent that it is hard to believe that he is only 34.

The reputation, like the style, was a first that of a country guitarist, only area-wide. But in recent years, as he has continued to broaden both his style and repertoire, so his reputation and following have broadened accordingly and there is now something of a controversy as to whether he is a country guitarist, pop guitarist, folk guitarist, or just an American guitarist. In fact, at present Atkins' records sell better at Nashville's two major record-and-book stores which cater to the local eggheads, than they do at the country-oriented Ernest Tubb record store.

That is way this record is something of a homecoming. For Chet has returned from his newer conquests to what are primarily country tunes, the kind of music he grew up with in that small town in eastern Tennessee. – Don Halberstam (Mr. Halberstam is a reporter on The Nashville Tennessean and a regular contributor to The Reporter)

From Billboard - December 14, 1959: Atkins displays his fine guitar solo technique in this package which should appeal to pop, folk, and country music buyers, and most of all, to those who admire first-rate, imaginative guitar work. Selections include "I Know That You Know," "Country Style," "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," and Rachmanioff's "Concerto In C Minor."

I Know That You Know

Rainbow

Hello Bluebird

Siesta

Country Style

Show Me The Way To Go Home

I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles

Backwoods

Country Gentleman

Slinkey

Jessie

Concerto In C Minor (Rachmaninoff)