Leona Atkins asked me to give the eulogy at the funeral for her husband, Chester, in Nashville in May 2001, and I didn’t want to do it but I couldn’t say no to Leona and so flew down to Nashville the night before and sat in a hotel room on Broadway and wrote my eulogy. I loved Chet. He was fifty-eight when we met and I was forty. He played the show a dozen times or so and he and I did some touring together. I didn’t know what friendship was until I met Chet—he really bestowed himself on people he liked. You sat in his office in Nashville and time stopped. He sat noodling on a guitar and telling stories about the stars and people he knew in radio in the Forties and pretty young women he’d met along the way. He never talked business, it was mostly about his scuffling early years, working with the Delmores and Maybelle Carter and Red Foley, and it was all for pleasure, there was no meanness in it, though he did particularly like to talk about sanctimonious gospel singers who enjoyed liquor and lasciviousness on the side. He did a good impression of the TV faith healer Ernest Ainsley, who would press his palm against the afflicted area and cry out, Heal!! A woman came to the reverend who said she had a tumor in her breast and he cried, I will not touch you there. But heal!!! Chet was not a religious man, certainly not a Christian—“But it’s a beautiful story,” he said—and he didn’t change his mind even when he hit a bad streak, cancer, a brain tumor, a stroke, in his early seventies. I visited him a couple times and it was hard for him to be seen like that, using a walker, unable to play the guitar like Chet Atkins, just sort of strum. The last time he played on the show, we turned his microphone way down, and Pat Donohue, sitting behind him, played his part, and that, I believe, was his last performance. He died at home, tended by Leona and his daughter Merle. The funeral service was held in the Ryman Auditorium, the longtime home of the Grand Ole Opry, and I stood on the stage, the coffin down on the floor, and tried to give a good account of the man, but it was a heavy occasion, no pleasure in it, and I was glad to get in a cab and head for the airport.
“I went up home to east Tennessee the other day. I was invited, went and saw a dozen folks that I hadn’t seen in forty-five or fifty years. Every damn one of them said, ‘I’ll bet you don’t know who I am,’ et cetera. I admitted I didn’t and they seemed disappointed. I left there when I had just turned eleven. I received an award for just growing up there, I suppose, and I couldn’t think of one nice thing to say. Those were some of the worst years of the old man’s life, don’t you know. But even the bad ones are good now that I think about it.”
—Chet Atkins
It was a Saturday night in the summer of 1946, Red Foley came on the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and sang “Old Shep” and then, before the commercial break for Prince Albert tobacco, nodded to his guitarist and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chester Atkins will now play ‘Maggie’ on the acoustic guitar,” and Mr. Atkins did, and afterward Minnie Pearl came up and kissed him and said, “You’re a wonderful musician, you’re just what we’ve been needing around here.”
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.”
Chester Burton Atkins was born June 20, 1924, the son of Ida Sharp and James Arley Atkins, a music teacher and piano tuner and singer, near Luttrell, Tennessee, on the farm of his grandfather who fought on the Union side in the Civil War.
Chet was born into a mess of trouble: his people were poor, his folks split up when he was six, he suffered from asthma, he grew up lonely and scared, tongue-tied and shy. His older brothers played music and he listened, and when he was six, he got a ukulele. When he broke a string, he pulled a wire off the screen door and tuned it up. He took up the guitar when he was nine, a Sears Silvertone with the action about a half-inch high at the twelfth fret, torture to play. He’d tune it up to a major chord and play it with a kitchen knife for a slide, Hawaiian style, “Steel Guitar Rag.” When he was eleven, he went to live with his daddy in Columbus, Georgia, where on a summer day you could see the snake tracks in the dust on a dirt road, but at night the radio brought in Cincinnati and Atlanta and Knoxville and even New York City.
That was the music that spoke to his heart.
Chet got a lot of music from his dad, who was a trained singer in the old hymns and sentimental ballads, which Chet remembered all his life—he could sing you several verses of “In the Gloaming” or “Seeing Nellie Home,” whether you asked for them or not. He knew the fiddle tunes and mountain music that he picked up trying to play the fiddle. But it was on the radio that he heard music that really entranced him, that was freer and looser and more jangly and elegant and brazen. His brother Jim played rhythm guitar with Les Paul when Les was with Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, and Chet paid close attention to that, and to George Barnes and the Sons of the Pioneers and the Hoosier Hot Shots, and Merle Travis, whom he heard on a crystal set from WLW in Cincinnati. Chet tried to get the Merle Travis sound, and in the process, he came up with his own and then he discovered Django Reinhardt and that set something loose in him.
You might be shy and homely and puny and from the sticks and feel looked down upon, but if you could play the guitar like that, you would be aristocracy and never have to point it out, anybody with sense would know it and the others don’t matter anyway.
He met Django backstage once in Chicago when Django was touring with Duke Ellington and got his autograph. Chet said, “I wanted to play for him but I didn’t get the chance.” But in Knoxville, doing the Midday Merry Go Round, he met Homer and Jethro, Henry Haynes and Kenneth Burns, who were hip to Django too and on Chet’s wavelength, and in 1949 they made an instrumental album called Galloping Guitar—sort of the Hot Club of Nashville. It got some airplay and that was his first big success and he was on his way.
Chet had dropped out of high school to go into radio and the music business—first with Jumping Bill Carlisle and Archie Campbell in Knoxville, and Johnnie and Jack in Raleigh, then Red Foley in Chicago and Springfield, Missouri, and Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters. In Cincinnati, he met Leona Johnson, who was singing on WLW with her twin sister, Lois, and after a year of courtship they married in 1946. He wrote in 1984: “Our percolator went out the other day and we counted up . . . she has stayed with me through four of them. If I were her, I wouldn’t have stayed around through the first one, which was a non-electric. After drinking coffee, there would be a residue on the cup and folks would read it and tell your fortune. Anyway, she is mine and she is a winner.”
Chet got himself fired numerous times along the way, a badge of honor for a musician with a mind of his own, and he kept getting fired in an upward direction and wound up coming to Nashville and WSM and the Opry and RCA, under the patronage of Fred Rose and Steve Sholes. He got to see the end of the era of the medicine show and the hillbilly band with the comedian with the blacked-out teeth and the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll—Chet had a front-row seat, as the guitarist, and he remembered everything he saw and he knew so many giants.
This man was a giant himself. He was the guitar player of the twentieth 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.
When he was almost fifty, he had a stroke of good luck, when he got colon cancer and thought he was going to die, and when he didn’t die, he found a whole new love of life. He walked away from the corporate music world and fell in love with the guitar again and went all over performing with Paul Yandell, playing with all the great orchestras, notably the Boston Pops, and started living by his own clock, so he had time to sit and talk with people and pick music with them and enjoy the social side of music and have more fun. He had a gift for friendship. He was so generous with stories, and if you drove around Nashville with him, he remembered one after another, it was a documentary movie about country music. Chet loved so many people. He especially loved the ones who seemed a little wild to him and who made him laugh. Dolly Parton always made him laugh, the way she flirted with him. She came to see him as he lay dying, and she made him laugh for about an hour. He loved Waylon Jennings. He loved Lenny Breaux. Jerry Reed. Ray Stevens. Vince Gill. Steve Wariner. And Brother Dave Gardner, the hipster revivalist comedian whom Chet discovered doing stand-up in a Nashville club between sets as a drummer and who said, “Dear hearts, gathered here to rejoice in the glorious Southland. Joy to the world! The South has always been the South. And I believe the only reason that folks live in the North is because they have jobs up there.”
He loved doing shows. He never had a bad night. He played some notes he didn’t mean to play but they never were bad notes. They simply were other notes. He liked to be alone backstage. He liked it quiet and calm. 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.
He said: “I enjoy the fruits of my efforts but I have never felt comfortable promoting myself. The condition is worsening now that I am on the back nine. My passion for the guitar and for fame is slowly dying and it makes me sad. I never thought my love for the guitar would fade. There are a lot of reasons, as we get older the high frequencies go, music doesn’t sound so good. And for some damn reason after hearing so many great players, I lose the competitive desire. Here I am baring my soul. That’s good though, isn’t it. I’m not a Catholic but I love that facet of their religion.”
Chet was curious and thoughtful about religion, though he was dubious about shysters and TV evangelists. He said, “I am seventy and still don’t know anything about life, what universal entity designed the body I live in or what will come after I am gone. I figure there will be eternity and nothing much else. Like pulling a finger out of water. If it’s as the Baptists claim, I think I would tire of streets of gold and would want to see brick houses. I believe that when I die I’ll probably go to Minnesota. The last time I was up there, it was freezing and I remember smiling and my upper lip went up and didn’t come back down.”