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NASHVILLE SKYLINE: Talking About Chet Atkins

"Mr. Guitar" was much more to Nashville, country music industry.

Chet Atkins' death leaves an enormous hole in country music and it's not one that's ever going to be filled, I fear. There are many reasons for that. He was, as everyone knows, an artist and label head and

producer who could do it all. He could play the music, he could hear the music, he could spot young

talent, he could coax the music out of people who didn't know what they could do, he could direct

session players with just a glance and a gesture and he could deal with the greater world outside

Nashville.

And, importantly, he spanned the entire history of country music. Early on he played with country's

founding family — members of the Carter Family — and he played in pivotal recording sessions with Hank Williams, the Everly Brothers and Elvis Presley. Then, he went on to discover and sign a marquee-full of artists including Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Roy Orbison, Don Gibson and Jim Reeves. He could make great music and he could sell records — often at the same time, a feat which few can master.

When he came to town in the late 1940s, there was no music industry as such in Nashville. He moved because Nashville hosted one of a series of radio barn dances around the country, WSM's "Grand Ole Opry." There were dozens of such shows at the time: Atkins had left station WLS' "National Barn Dance" in Chicago. Others centered around WSB in Atlanta, KMOX in St. Louis, WBAP in Fort Worth, KWKH in Shreveport, KVOO in Tulsa, WBT in Charlotte, WLW in Cincinnati, WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia, and even WHN in New York, which had a barn dance hosted by Tex Ritter. A music scene built up around those barn dances and attracted the record companies out of New York.

Atkins and Owen Bradley at Decca (now MCA), who happened to also be a musician and a decent man, built modern Nashville as a music capital. Bradley built Nashville's first true record label recording studio in 1955 when Decca threatened to move its country field recordings to Dallas. RCA built a Nashville studio in 1957 and made Atkins head of its label operations.

Don Law at Columbia and Ken Nelson at Capitol (who worked out of Los Angeles) were also important as executives, but Atkins and Bradley built the structure and made it solid. They created the industry in Nashville.

When I first met Chet in the early '70s, I had started covering country music for Rolling Stone and there were a lot of people in Nashville who weren't very happy about that. Country music — when it was covered at all in its early days — was either ignored by the legitimate press or denigrated as just hillbilly junk. The few country music publications that existed fawned over country stars. Critical reviews and probing interviews did not exist.

It took years for the Nashville dailies to accept country music. The city of Nashville itself — a Protestant, conservative town — did not welcome country music until it started becoming a respectable industry and one that made money. Atkins was, of course, hugely responsible for that. Then, once the city began accepting country music, it started to become protective of that industry. After my early country coverage in Rolling Stone, one of the two daily newspapers in Nashville ran a half-page attack on me and Rolling Stone as — basically — being outside agitators, stirring up trouble.

In the midst of all that, I called Chet Atkins from New York City out of the blue and requested an interview. "Come on down," he said. He welcomed me, introduced me around town, took me to lunch and bought me drinks, and played tapes and played live for me in his office and in his home studio. Boundaries and preconceptions didn't exist for Atkins. The man loved music and knew that the music would eventually solve all of those other problems.

He was frank with me about many things and he said that when he started out with RCA, he was very insecure. "When I first started running the operation here, I was scared," he told me. "I was scared to hire musicians, scared to spend money ... Finally, I'd been in there a few months and hadn't done much and I thought, the hell with it, I'll spend the money and make great records and either get fired or sell some records. So, I became my own man when we made 'Can't Stop Loving You' with Don Gibson and 'Oh Lonesome Me' ... After that we made a lot of them."

He was criticized (by me as well as many others) for starting the Nashville Sound, along with Owen Bradley — a pop-leaning sound that favored violins and choruses rather than fiddles and steel guitar. But, as I came to realize, in the wake of rock and roll's almost complete destruction of the country music market in the late 1950s, that commercially viable Nashville Sound was the only thing that saved country music and saved Nashville.

I remain convinced that if Chet hadn't been the man who was basically in charge (with Bradley as bolster), Nashville as a music center would never have evolved as it has. The amount of suspicion, insularity, greed and just plain stupidity in the country music business would have triumphed and kept Nashville as minor-league. The hoodlums and thieves carrying pistols and shady contracts who were masquerading as music executives — and there are still a few of them around — would have thoroughly corrupted the music business. Chet Atkins, even though he came from the humblest rural origin, became a true man of the world, an honest man who loved the music, and the Nashville industry followed his example.

Along the way, he personally carried the music to the world as a traveling, performing ambassador. He also found time to record over 100 albums himself, and we tend to forget that he was a master of classical as well as jazz guitar. I still love to play many of his albums regularly. His duet albums with Les Paul, Mark Knopfler and Merle Travis remain delights. But the album I play most often remains obscure and isn't available on CD.

The Night Atlanta Burned, by the Atkins String Company, is a gorgeous example of country/bluegrass/classical fusion and remains a joy every time I hear it. Atkins, on lead guitar, is accompanied by his longtime sideman Paul Yandell on rhythm guitar, Lisa Silver on violin and the great fiddler Johnny Gimble playing mandolin. This album was released in 1975 and long predates other such fusion attempts. But then, everything Chet Atkins did predates any such other attempts.

("Nashville Skyline" is a column by Sonicnet.com country music editor Chet Flippo)

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