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Chet Atkins Revisited 3

Chet Atkins Revisited

rare SESAC ep 1959
(promo only)

Friends And Family Bid Final Farewell
(7/4/01, 10 a.m. ET) -- Family and friends packed Nashville's Ryman Auditorium to say goodbye to country icon Chet Atkins Tuesday (July 3) morning. Steve Wariner, Ray Stevens, and an emotional Vince Gill served as pallbearers, while honorary pallbearers included renowned songwriter Harlan Howard, Porter Wagoner, Les Paul, Jerry Reed, Don and Phil Everly, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Suzy Bogguss, Mark Knopfler, Don Gibson, and Frances W. Preston.

Also in attendance were Waylon Jennings, Amy Grant, Bill Anderson, and Ralph Emery. Monday (June 2) night's visitation at a Nashville funeral home brought a frail Johnny Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, in addition to several funeral attendees.

Eddy Arnold, who was produced by Atkins, offered a reading during the service, stating, "We will never see the like, the talent, in one man." He added that Aktins was "one of the greatest musicians who ever lived."

Flower arrangements shaped like guitars filled the Ryman stage, where a single spotlight shone on Atkins's signature white hat and orange guitar. Also filling the Ryman stage during the service was music, as Marty Stuart and wife Connie Smith opened the service performing "Farther Along." The music continued as a visibly shaken Steve Wariner and Vince Gill shared in a guitar medley with Atkins's longtime friend Paul Yandell.

After the service, the honorary pallbearers walked by Atkins's casket to say their last goodbyes, followed by family and the pallbearers. "Mr. Guitar" was buried Tuesday (July 3) afternoon at Harpeth Hills Memory Gardens in Nashville.

-- Margy Holland and Nancy Brooks, Nashville

soon

Opry picker Joe Edwards stood in line with about a thousand other fans waiting to pay their respects.

"Every time I wasn't on the stage I'd go back to the dressing room where he was jamming and I soaked up everything I could hear and he was so kind if I had a question he'd answer it for me," Edwards said. Public radio host Garrison Keillor eulogized famed guitar player and producer Chet Atkins in Nashville Tuesday morning. Keillor recalled Atkins as "the" guitar player of the 20th Century, who influenced musicians around the world.

He recalled a note from Atkins who wrote that he and his wife Leona had just gone through their fourth coffee pot and said he wouldn't have stayed past the first one if he'd been her.

Keillor said Atkins occasionally played some notes he didn't mean to, but said "they weren't bad notes -- they were just other notes." Atkins had been a guest several times on Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion."

Friends like Vince Gill said Atkins would have appreciated the humor. "and the best thing about the guy is he had a sense of humor, Chet had a great wit, dry, just amazing... alot of people never got to see...I felt so blessed to have been able to be his friend." Fellow artist Eddy Arnold spoke earlier, saying when people discussed great guitar players, they were really arguing about who came below Atkins.

Arnold was emotional as he spoke. "I loved Chet Atkins." Arnold's reading included words from Walt Whitman. "We must separate, take from my lips this kiss whoever you are I give it to you... I hope we meet again. Good-bye Chet." The service ended with Atkins' own words describing the last days of his life. "I still like to hold my guitar. It's a familiar comfort to cradle it. I pluck the strings and feel the vibrations against my chest. I know the life I feel buzzing inside me is my own."

"Imagine New York City without Times Square and you'll get some Idea of what Nashville is going to be without Chet Atkins," talk show host Ralph Emery said.

Atkins won 14 Grammy awards, recorded more than 75 albums of guitar instrumentals and sold more than 75-million records.

Guitars Gently Weep as Nashville Pays Tribute to Chet Atkins
By DAVID FIRESTONE

NASHVILLE, July 3 — Chet Atkins was as lean and spare and intense as Nashville is boisterous, a reticent musical craftsman who shaped and defined a city of showmen. At his funeral today, a worshipful country music industry tried to define its debt to him, finally giving up on superlatives and expressing itself as he did in the gentle picking of a Gretsch electric guitar.
As his friends Marty Stuart and Vince Gill played some of Mr. Atkins's hits, much of country music's royalty sat motionless on the hard wooden pews of the Ryman Auditorium, the old gospel tabernacle where Mr. Atkins played so often with the Grand Ole Opry. There was a strong sense among them that Mr. Atkins, who died of cancer on Saturday at 77, was the best musician of their music's founding generation, and took with him something elemental that is now lost in the marketplace. "We will never see the like of his talent in one man," said a barely composed Eddy Arnold, the country singer whose hits in the 1950's and 60's were produced by Mr. Atkins. "When you talked about who was the greatest guitar player, Chet's name was never mentioned, because you just took him and put him up there, and then you argued about the rest of them."

(photo)
The Associated Press Vince Gill, Paul Yandell and Steve Wariner, left to right front, with David Hungate on bass, in Nashville on Tuesday at Chet Atkins's funeral. Mr. Atkins guitar and hat were on the stage nearby.

But even beyond his six-string virtuosity, Mr. Atkins presided over the city for decades as its most prominent recording executive, a principal creator of the smooth and palatable "Nashville Sound" that took the music from its bluegrass origins to worldwide commercial success and erected a pillar of the state's economy. If the strings and controlled arrangements he and other producers added to the music stole some of its spontaneity and edge over the years, Mr. Atkins always said he did what was necessary to keep from being drowned out by rock 'n' roll. Some results of his rescue efforts were evident in the long caravan of limousines that pulled up to the side door of the Ryman this morning and discharged celebrities that he first signed to recording contracts, or produced, or coached through ramshackle lives to stardom. "He changed my life," said Charley Pride, the industry's only black superstar, discovered by Mr. Atkins. "Everything that ever happened to me started with him."
Dolly Parton, whom he signed to RCA, was not there, but Ray Stevens was, and Steve Wariner and T. G. Sheppard.
But it was the older stars, Mr. Atkins's own fragile generation, who showed up in the greatest numbers, struggling through infirmities to pay their tributes. Kitty Wells and her husband, Johnny Wright, walked slowly into the hall, Mr. Wright using a cane. Jumpin' Bill Carlisle, 92, whose Knoxville radio show gave Mr. Atkins early exposure in the 1940's, arrived in a wheelchair, a difficult sight for those who remembered him bounding across the stage of the Ryman during two of the three decades it housed the Opry. Waylon Jennings, country music's legendary rowdy, squirmed into his wheelchair from the back of the day's longest stretch limousine.
"He was a genius," said Mr. Jennings, whom Mr. Atkins signed and produced. "We used to argue and we'd get madder than hell. Then we'd go inside and make some great records."
Mr. Atkins's orange Gretsch guitar sat on the front of the stage in a spotlight during the service, next to one of his signature white hats. His friend Paul Yandell played a similar guitar on "Mr. Sandman," an instrumental hit for Mr. Atkins in 1955, and Connie Smith sang the gospel hymn "Farther Along," backed by an instrumental group that included Mr. Stuart on mandolin.
Later, perhaps in a tribute to Mr. Atkins's sweetened production style, Mr. Stuart and several other musicians played the old Skeeter Davis song "The End of the World," accompanied by a string quartet. Garrison Keillor, who became a friend of Mr. Atkins's after many years of sharing the stage on Mr. Keillor's public radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," gave a eulogy laced with quotations from their personal correspondence, revealing a joking side to the guitarist not always on display in the studio.
"I had a screamer in the audience," Mr. Atkins wrote Mr. Keillor a few years ago. "I saw her later and she wasn't all that bad, about 35. A fellow could run some weight off her and maybe fall in love." Mr. Keillor told some of the Atkins stories that have entered into local lore: How Mr. Atkins grew up poor and asthmatic in eastern Tennessee, replacing a broken string on his Sears Silvertone guitar with a wire from the screen door; how he developed his trademark picking style listening to Merle Travis on a crystal radio set; how he enchanted listeners at his first Opry performance in 1946 with an acoustic version of "Maggie," prompting Minnie Pearl to kiss him and say: "You're a wonderful musician. You're just what we've been needing around here." Mr. Keillor reminded his audience of about 1,800 that Mr. Atkins knew and played with Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, and said Dolly Parton recently kept him laughing for hours as she flirted outrageously with him on his deathbed.
And he called Mr. Atkins the "guitar player of the 20th century," perhaps the greatest influence on other guitar players any musician has had.
"You might be shy and homely and puny and from the sticks and feel looked down upon," Mr. Keillor said, "but if you could play the guitar like that, you would be aristocracy and you would never have to point it out. Anybody with sense would know, and the others don't matter that much anyway."

www.country.com
Chet Atkins Made Dreams Possible
Michael Gray
07/03/2001

Chet Atkins' contributions to music go far beyond his mastery of the guitar, though most regard his talent on the instrument as second to none. While head of RCA's Nashville office from 1957 to 1982, Atkins had a knack for spotting young talent and nurturing careers. "Chet made our dreams possible," said Bobby Bare, one of the artists Atkins championed. "I've had a great life and it was because of my association with Chet. I really don't think I could have accomplished what I did with anybody else but Chet."

Atkins died Saturday (June 30) at his home in Nashville after a long battle with cancer. He was 77. Family, friends and fans will pay their last respects at 11 a.m. Tuesday (July 3) during a service at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, with interment to follow at Harpeth Hills Cemetery.

Garrison Keillor will deliver the eulogy for Atkins. Musical tributes will be offered by Vince Gill, Steve Wariner, Paul Yandell, Marty Stuart, Pat Donahue and a string quartet. Eddy Arnold and Kevin King also will speak during the service, which will be carried live by WSM-AM (650).

"I thank God for Chet Atkins," said Charley Pride, another Atkins' beneficiary. A member of the Country Music Hall of Fame with Atkins, Pride lives in Dallas and was en route to Nashville Monday to attend the funeral. "I see him as a father figure in terms of what he did for me and how he changed my life. I will never forget it." Pride broke country music's color barrier in the 1960s and is the only country superstar who is black. Atkins convinced RCA executives in California to give Pride his first record deal. Pride praised Atkins for giving him a fair shot without getting hung up on skin color. "When he went out to the meeting [with RCA] he played my music and didn't tell them what color I was," Pride recalls. "He just let them hear my voice and wanted to know what they thought." Atkins at first billed Pride as "Country" Charley Pride. Later he proved to be one of RCA's most successful acts, recording for the label for 20 years and scoring 29 No. 1 hits on the Billboard country singles chart. "I stayed so in awe of Chet," Pride said. "I've been around presidents and a lot of other [important] people, but there only have been two people on this earth that I was nervous around: Chet Atkins and Mickey Mantle. It's because of the respect I have for them." As a producer, Atkins was instrumental in creating the "Nashville Sound" of the late 1950s and '60s. Along with Owen Bradley and others, Atkins broadened the market for country records and subsequently helped the country music industry endure the onslaught of rock 'n' roll.

Adding horns, strings, backup vocals and other elements of popular music to country music melodies, Atkins ironed out much of the hillbilly in hillbilly music, making country smooth and more sophisticated. An essential component of the Nashville Sound was the corps of studio musicians known as the A-Team, a small but distinct group of sidemen who played on most recording sessions in Nashville. A-Team bassist Bob Moore estimates that he worked on 18,000 recording sessions, many with Atkins.

Moore praised Atkins for his easy hand in the studio and for having complete confidence in his musicians. "He would sit in the control room and every now and then he'd come out wanting to change a chord or something," Moore recalled. "He was enjoyable to work with. He took suggestions from us." Bare agrees that Atkins did not like to interfere with the talented musicians he hired to make his records.

"Chet picked really great musicians," he said. "He knew they could play so he let 'em play. He would have a general idea of how he wanted the song to go. If he had a lick or riff in mind, he'd go out and show it to the musicians and then sit back and let them go. He was an expert at staying out of the way."

Bare remained close to Atkins up until his death. He sometimes took Atkins' masterful musicianship for granted. "I'd just go hang out with him," Bare said. "We would be talking and he would be noodling around on the guitar. I would forget he was the greatest guitar player in the world. Every now and then it would come back to me. He would be playing something on the guitar and I'd say, 'My God!'

"He was bigger than life, and he so underplayed it," Bare observed. "He was like a bluegrass player. He was there to play and that was it. He would much rather concentrate on playing than entertaining an audience. But he got pretty good at the entertaining part, too." Session veteran Harold Bradley, a guitar-playing member of the A-Team and now president of the Nashville Association of Musicians, ranks Atkins above all other pickers.

"He's influenced more guitar players than any other guitar player in the world," Bradley said. "When you name guitar players, you think of Les Paul, because he designed the Les Paul [guitar] and was a wonderful player. And you think of Andres Segovia. But the truth is that Chet was more famous than either of those people. All over the world, wherever you go, they'll know Chet. He represented Nashville in such a wonderful way. We were so lucky to have him."