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Chet Atkins
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Chet Atkins was born Chester Burton Atkins on a farm near Luttrell, Tennessee, a small town about 20 miles north of Knoxville, on June 20, 1924. His parents, James Arly Atkins and Ida Sharp Atkins, each had children from a previous marriage. The family was large and poor. With a father who was a music teacher, piano tuner, and evangelist singer, a mother who played piano and sang, and siblings who played instruments, Atkins was surrounded by music from birth. At the age of six he played his first instrument, a ukulele, replacing broken strings with wire pulled from a screen door. Three years later he began playing a Sears Silvertone guitar and a fiddle along with his siblings and their stepfather, Willie Strevel.
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Chet Atkins’ early influences were Jimmie Rodgers and Merle Travis. By the time he left high school in 1941, he was a highly proficient guitar player. He landed a job at WNOX Knoxville, with the Bill Carlisle Show, and ... played with the Dixie Swingers (with whom he made his first broadcast). He also worked with Homer and Jethro at the station, before leaving after 3 years to go to WLW Cincinnati.
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![Chet Atkins - A Life In Music [2000]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/c/h/e/chet-atkins/i/002.jpg)
One of the true legends of country music, Nashville icon Chet Atkins has enjoyed a remarkably long and fruitful career, recording an astonishing number of albums (somewhere around 70) and racking up 13 Grammy Awards. A multi-talented musician, Atkins has has a marked influence on various genres of music, including country, blues, rock, and even Easy Listening. A LIFE IN MUSIC celebrates Atkins's career, with the star being joined by admiring musical luminaries across many genres, including Dolly Parton, Mark Knopfler, George Benson, and Peter Frampton. The incredible life of Chet Atkins, particularly his more then fifty years making music, is explored through performances, interviews, and archival footage.
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The multifaceted Chet Atkins is probably the most influential person in Nashville -- and in country music as a whole. Throughout his long career he has been involved with every facet of the music business as a top session player, a solo artist, a record producer, an A&R man and a label executive. Atkins started out as a prodigiously gifted musician, inspired by the finger picking style of country super star Merle Travis. He went from a journeyman road musician to an in-demand sideman on the Grand Old Opry in a very short period of time. He was part of the first Nashville A-team of session players, contributing his distinctive sound to records by the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson and just about any country artist who recorded at RCA Studios in the 1950s. Throughout his career he has recorded too many solo albums to count, all of which are marked by his sophisticated melding of Swing, jazz, Easy Listening and country picking.
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Without Chet Atkins, country music may never have crossed over into the pop charts in the '50s and '60s. Although he recorded hundreds of solo records, Atkins' largest influence came as a session musician and a record producer. During the '50s and '60s, he helped create the Nashville sound, a style of country music that owed nearly as much to pop as it did to honky tonks. And as a guitarist, he was without parallel. Atkins' style grew out of his admiration for Merle Travis, expanding Travis' signature syncopated thumb and fingers roll into new territory. Interestingly, Atkins didn't begin his musical career by playing guitar.
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Chet Atkins was born June 20, 1924 in Luttrell, Tennessee at the foothills of the Clinch mountains which mark the beginning of what is known as Appalachia. He first began playing on a ukulele at the age of five, using strings made from a screen door. His older brother, Jim, learned to play guitar first and it was he who gave Chet his first lessons. Chet came from a musical family and his grandfather, Wes Atkins, had made fiddles and played the simple Appalachian mountain tunes, which had evolved from Scottish and Irish ballads. Chet’s father, James Arley Atkins, carried on the family tradition as a music teacher, piano tuner and voice instructor who had among his students a young Roy Acuff.
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Chet Atkins