A Session With Chet Atkins

 

Caravan

A Session With Chet Atkins

RCA Victor LPM-1090 RE

1961

From the back cover: Chet Atkins has built a bridge. With six steel guitar strings for material and the songs in this album for blueprints, he has brilliantly spanned the gulf between country and popular music. His co-worker in this enterprise are some of the top names in country music: Bud Isaacs, steel guitar; Dale Potter, fiddle; Ray Eddington, Rhythm guitar; John Gordy, piano and cellist; Bob Moore, bass; and Buddy Harman, drums. On the charts are as choice a collection of standard tunes as you will find in the annals of Tin Pan Alley.

The World's Most Popular Guitar got his first professional licks in at an age when most boys are coping with nothing more challenging than high school proms and algebra exams. Chet quit school in the miiddle of his Junior year for a job with Radio Station WNOX in Knoxville, Tennessee. In the long, lean years that followed hie wandered through the South and Midwest, hiring on at some ratio station as staff guitarist and inevitably getting fired. ("I couldn't wiggle or sing, all I could do was play the guitar..."). In 1950 he returned to Tennessee, this time as a featured performer in Nashville's famed Grand Ole Opry. Trher, without wiggling or singing, he has built a massive reputation as a great guitarist, a reputation already so enduring that it is hard to believe that Atkins is only in his mid-thirties. Today his style, like his reputation, is wide and varied. Chet is equally at home with Spanish, popular and classic guitar as he is with the country music that first launched him.

In this session, however, Chet returns to Nashville's strong musical tradition – but with some big differences. For one thing, there's the deliciously sophisticated sound of John Gordy's celeste adding non-local color to Caravan. Then, there's the impish Atkins humor that sneaks the ominous strain of Dragnet into a light-hearted rendition of Corrine, Corrine. And a pulsating change-of-pace Latin beat surges through A Gay Ranchero.

Throughout this entire album, you'll be conscious of the excellent musicians who surround Chet. But above all, you'll be constantly aware of Chet's mastery of his guitar. There's always a feeling of suspense... a waiting to see what surprise Chet will have ready on his next trip to the mike. And that feeling of suspense, of excitement is all the definition you need of the word, "artist."

South

Indiana (Back Home Again In Indiana)

Alabama Jubilee

Have You Ever Been Lonely? (Have You Ever Been Blue?)

Red Wing

Old Man River

Caravan

Corrine, Corrina

The Birth Of The Blues

A Gay Ranchero

Frankie And Johnnie

Honeysuckle Rose