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[This Just In]

IN MEMORIAM
Chet Atkins, 1924 - 2001

BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Chet Atkins, the guitarist who helped transform country music from folk art into a major industry, died last Saturday, June 30, in his Nashville home. Atkins had twice suffered from cancer, beating an outbreak in his colon in the 1970s and surviving surgery for the removal of a brain tumor four years ago.

Although Atkins was one of the most influential and expansive country finger-style guitarists, eventually performing with orchestras and recording albums with Les Paul, Mark Knopfler, and Suzy Bogguss, his biggest contributions were as a record producer and executive with the RCA label. It was Atkins who persuaded RCA to outbid Columbia for the young Elvis Presley's contract. And in the '60s Atkins helped develop the " countrypolitan " sound, replacing the genre's traditional steel guitars and fiddles with strings and lush vocal choruses to make the music more marketable to the mainstream.

That was such a remarkable contrast to his down-home roots that the lanky, quiet artist and businessman probably found it ironic. He was born into poverty on June 20, 1924, in Luttrell, Tennessee, a rural community in the Clinch Mountains. Atkins was a child prodigy whose grandfather was a local fiddle champion and whose father taught music. At 17 he began performing on radio broadcasts with various bands until he was hired by the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle. Atkins's popularity with their troupe soon earned him his own billing and a regular slot, along with the Carters, at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry.

Atkins had his first instrumental hit, " The Galloping Guitar, " in 1949, then moved to Nashville to become one of RCA's core studio players and talent scouts. In 1957 he became the label's manager of recording operations. Atkins's home in the heart of Nashville's so-called Music Row became RCA's Studio B, now a part of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. There he produced or supervised hit sessions by Presley, Hank Snow, Jim Reeves, Don Gibson, Roger Miller, Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, and Charley Pride.

As a guitarist, Atkins continued to embrace new styles. Early on he was inspired by the great country performer Merle Travis, and developed a thumb-and-three-fingers counterpart to the famed thumb-and-index-finger " Travis picking " technique. After Atkins stopped playing regularly on country sessions in the 1960s, flamenco, jazz, Latin, and classical music all made their way into his repertoire. He became president of RCA Nashville in 1967, but in the early '70s he began easing out of the director's chair to return to his first love: performing.

For his stiff-but-likable personality, Atkins received the nickname " Country Gentleman. " Gibson gave its lovely Atkins-designed model of guitar the same name. He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1973, joining the ranks of many of the artists he had produced the decade before. In addition to his playing on hundreds of recordings for others, Atkins leaves behind nearly 100 albums under his own name, including Christmas records, early world-music experiments, and a pair of duet discs with another of his early influences, Les Paul, Atkins's senior by one year.

Issue Date: July 5 - 12, 2001