I’ve been listening to country music since I was five and to Chet Atkins since before the earth was formed. That’s a sound that got inside me and rambled around like an old friend that had always been there.
When I was a kid I’d get up right close to the TV when Chet came on and try to see how he did what he did. After weeks and months of peering into the TV tube I realized that he was playing the rhythm with a steady up-and-down pattern of his thumb and picking the melody with his fingers!
Black blues singers had used that technique for a long time. It was countrified by the Everly Brothers’ father Ike, commercialized by Merle Travis, and gentrified by Chet.
The next step – and by far the hardest – was to try to do that myself. (The guitar was an instrument I took to naturally; I got my first guitar at 14 from selling seed packets I’d ordered from an ad on the back of a comic book. When it finally arrived, I was in school. My mother opened it and saw that it had broken up in the mail. She hurriedly glued the balsa wood pieces back together so I could have an in-tact instrument when I got home. That flimsy instrument was the beginning of my love affair with the guitar that has been such a satisfaction to my heart.) But it was never practice to me; it’s not practice doing what you love – it’s play, it’s time well spent, it’s fun.)
I finally got the thumb working out a steady rhythm, but the fingers didn’t coordinate with it the way I wanted; I couldn’t get them to strike the strings simultaneously with the thumb. But that was OK – I made good music alternating the thumb and fingers. Gradually I was able to synchronize my playing so that the thumb and fingers could hit the strings with the thumb or independently of it.
Just like Chet. Well, not exactly – there’s never been anyone just like Chet. But I picked out his songs and play them to this day. “Salty Dog Rag” and “Freight Train” still echo in my house.
I play the guitar with finger picks; since learning how to finger pick, I have never been happy playing with a flat pick. Chet used a thumb pick and his finger nails. He said the guitar is an instrument meant to be played with the fingers. I never was able to use my nails.
I saw Chet perform in Charlotte with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra on his final tour. He had aged, but he was the same Chet I had seen on TV – relaxed, confident, friendly – and the master of his instrument. It was the event of a lifetime for me; I still have the ticket stub.
He passed away not long after that. No one has eulogized the man like Garrison Keilor:
"He played guitar in a style that hadn't been seen before, with a thumb pick for the bass note and two fingers to play the contrapuntal melody, and at a time when guitarists were expected to be flashy and play "Under The Double Eagle" with the guitar up behind their head, this one hunched down over the guitar and made it sing, made a melody line that was beautiful and legato. A woman wrote, who saw him play in a roadhouse in Cincinnati in 1946, "He sat hunched in the spotlight and played and the whole room suddenly got quiet. It was a drinking and dancing crowd, but there was something about Chet Atkins that could take your breath away."
"He liked to be alone backstage. He liked it quiet and calm in the dressing room and he counted on George Lunn to make it that way. I remember him backstage, alone, walking around in the cavernous dark of some opera house out west, holding the guitar, playing, singing to himself; he needed to be alone with himself and get squared away, because the Chet people saw on stage was the same Chet you hung around with in his office, joking with Paul about having a swimming pool shaped like a guitar amp, the joke about "By the time I learned I couldn't tune very well, I was too rich to care," and singing "Would Jesus Wear A Rolex," and "I Just Can't Say Goodbye" and ending the show with his ravishing beautiful solo, "Vincent," the audience sitting in rapt silence. It was all the same Chet who sat at home with Leona, watching a golf tournament with the sound off, and playing his guitar, a long stream-of-consciousness medley in which twenty or thirty tunes came together perfectly, as in a dream, his daddy's songs and the Banks of the Ohio and Recuerdos de la Alhambra and Smile and Stephen Foster and Boudleaux Bryant and the Beatles and Freight Train, one long sparkling stream of music, as men in plaid pants hit their long high approach shots in a green paradise."
"This man was a giant himself. He was the guitar player of the 20th Century. He was the model of who you should be and what you should look like. You could tell it whenever he picked up a guitar, the way it fit him. His upper body was shaped to it, from a lifetime of playing: his back was slightly hunched, his shoulders rounded, and the guitar was the missing piece. He was an artist and there was no pretense in him; he never waved the flag or held up the cross or traded on his own sorrows. He was the guitarist. His humor was self-deprecating; he was his own best critic. He inspired all sorts of players who never played anything like him. He was generous and admired other players' work and he told them so. He had a natural reserve to him, but when he admired people, he went all out to tell them about it. And because there was no deception in him, his praise meant more than just about anything else. If Chet was a fan of yours, you never needed another one."
I miss him.
