CHET ATKINS
Chester Burton Atkins was born on June 20, 1924 on a small farm located in Luttrell, Tennessee. The family was big and the income was small. Chet's dad was a music teacher, a piano tuner, and an evangelist singer. Chet's mom sang and played piano, and his brothers and sisters played various instruments. As one story goes, nine-year old Chet traded a pistol for a guitar. Exactly what a nine-year old was doing with a pistol is unclear.
Chet also played fiddle. When Chet was eight his parents divorced, and when he was twelve he went to live on his father's farm in Georgia. Chet heard Merle Travis play guitar on the radio and was impressed with the Travis style of fingerpicking. He decided he wanted to play like Merle. By the time Chet graduated from high school he was an accomplished guitarist and fiddle player. He got a job playing fiddle on the radio at WNOX in Knoxville, Tennesee, and then started playing guitar on the radio. Apparently there was a time when many musicians played live on the radio. "Barn dance shows" were popular, and Chet was one of the guys that made the barns boogie.
Chet moved around a lot. He worked at WLW in Cincinnati, and then briefly for the "National Barn Dance" on Chicago's WLS. Then he went to Nashville where he recorded his first single, Guitar Blues, for Bullet records. He moved to KWTO in Springfield, Missouri, where a guy named Si Simon gave him the nickname "Chet." Chet was then fired from KWTO because his playing was too polished—apparently, they wanted something a little more hillbilly. Then in 1947 Steve Sholes at RCA signed Chet as a singer and guitarist. After another move or two, Chet ended up back in Nashville with the Carter Sisters, playing at the Grand Ole Opry.
At this point Chet became friends with Fred Rose, a country music pioneer. Fred had a publishing company. With Rose's support, Chet became a major session man in Nashville and played on recordings by Hank Williams, The Carlisles, Kitty Wells, the Everly Brothers, and Elvis Presley, to name a few. Chet started producing sessions for RCA. The sessions went so well RCA made Chet the manager of a new recording studio in Nashville.
Chet significantly shaped the "Nashville sound," and brought country music more into the mainstream. Some say this was a negative thing, and Atkins was known to apologize for it.
In addition to his production work, Chet released about 75 albums.