CMT Blog: Chet Atkins

When Jerry Reed died this week, country music lost one of its most colorful characters. Yeah, he wrote some memorable songs, made some great records and developed a guitar style that was truly his own, but his image as a redneck good ol’ boy from Georgia permeated his music and ultimately led to his success as an actor. Through the years, other country music artists have been in feature films, but how many of those movies have been as successful as his work with Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit or with Adam Sandler in The Waterboy?

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I’ve been in Nashville for just about a year now. I guess that puts me somewhere between assimilated local, and wide eyed visitor. I’m still finding new and interesting things almost every week, but I’ve also had time to key in on a few of my favorite Nashville attractions. With vacation season just around the corner, why not share some of these “can’t miss” spots.

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Merlefest is probably the world’s largest Americana and roots music festival. I was at the very first Merle Watson Memorial Festival (as it was called in those days) 21 years ago. The first concert featured jams with Chet Atkins, Doc, Earl Scruggs, Mac Wiseman, Jim Shumate, Sam Bush, Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, Grandpa Jones, Marty Stuart, Newgrass Revival, John Hartford, Mark O’Connor and others inside the Walker Center and outside on a flatbed truck stage. I remember sitting on hay bales outside watching the whole thing go down. A few years later, I was playing Merlefest as a member of Alison Krauss and Union Station. One particular year was memorable because the mainstage show consisted of us and Ronnie Milsap, who just murdered the crowd with a solo guitar version of “Knoxville Girl.”

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At this point in the digital age, why isn’t every album ever released by a major label available either on CD or as a download? And why does it so often take a foreign record label to re-release classic music that’s sitting in a corporate vault?

I just got back from the Ernest Tubb Record Shop after learning that two of Chet Atkins‘ RCA albums from the mid ‘70s — The Night Atlanta Burned and The First Nashville Guitar Quartet — were finally released on CD. Not by RCA, of course, but by Raven Records, an Australian company that packaged them together on one disc. I gladly plunked down $24, but honestly, for the past decade, I would have paid twice that amount — but that CD simply didn’t exist and the download still doesn’t.

Atkins recorded both albums with acoustic ensembles — The Night Atlanta Burned with guitarist Paul Yandell, mandolinist Johnny Gimble and violinist Lisa Silver and The First Nashville Guitar Quartet with guitarists Liona Boyd, John Knowles and John Pell. Great stuff. While interviewing Chet Atkins in the mid ‘90s — when he was recording for Columbia — I asked if he thought The Night Atlanta Burned would ever be released on CD. He said, “All of that belongs to RCA. I’d love to see it released, but I don’t have any control over what they do.”

Raven made me very happy through the years with some of the titles they’ve been the first to release on CD, including an expanded version of Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb’s Reunion. Raven was also the first to offer CD versions of Michael Murphey’s Geronimo’s Cadillac and Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir, two excellent albums he made for A&M in the ‘70s.

If projected sales figures prohibit releasing CD versions of certain albums, how much does it cost to make a download available? No doubt, there are financial and legal factors at play in some situations, but it sure looks like the major labels are still sitting on a lot of music because they either don’t know what they’ve got — or don’t care enough about it to make it available to the public.

Oops!

There’s nothing more embarrassing as a journalist than to have a story that’s factually incorrect. It damages the credibility of the entire story when readers see any information that is wrong, and it can also cast doubt on other stories in the same media outlet or by the same writer. And yet, journalists are people, so mistakes happen. Been there, done that, lost plenty of sleep over it, too.

One of the funniest stories (to me, probably not to the reporter or to the artists who were in the article) occurred 25 years ago, on Feb. 4. The Oak Ridge Boys’ bass singer, Richard Sterban, decided not to go through with his planned wedding, and a Knoxville paper reported — erroneously, it turned out — that he jilted disco queen Donna Summer. The problem was in spelling: Sterban walked away from Donna Summers. The paper missed the “s.”

It was quite a shock to the singer Summer, and probably to her husband, Bruce Sudano. The couple had just had a child the previous August. There was some crossover between the pop and country worlds, because Summer wrote the Dolly Parton hit “Starting Over Again” and the Oaks sang on Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away.” However, Sterban and Summer as a couple should have raised a red flag somewhere before the story ran. Sterban, by the way, did marry Donna Summers five years later. They had a child and are still married.

There’ve been other miscues since. NBC reported briefly on Christmas Day 1994 that Chet Atkins had died earlier in the year. The real celebrity in question had the same initials, actor Claude Akins. A fan magazine reported in the fall that “Ready, Set, Don’t Go” singer Miley Cyrus was pregnant. She was not. This month, Slim Whitman was reported in several media outlets to have died. He is, in fact, alive and well and living in Florida, a robust 84 years old.

There are two morals to the story. One, reporters need to always check their facts. Two, if you’re unhappy that you’re not a celebrity, don’t be: Imagine how much time you might have to invest in clearing up the reports of your demise.

I started thinking about Chet Atkins and his legacy after the news this week that Tony Brown is starting his own production company and locating it in Atkins’ old building on 17th St. South, also known as Music Square East. There’s no doubt in my mind that Brown is the single person most qualified to sit in Chet Atkins’ chair.

Brown, as you probably know, is a musician, producer and label executive responsible for a number of things. He played piano for Elvis Presley and in Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band, among others. He signed artists ranging from Lyle Lovett to Steve Earle to Rodney Crowell to Shooter Jennings. As a producer he has presided over recordings from much of Brooks & Dunn’s work to Reba McEntire’s current top-charting duets album. Equally importantly, he’s been a force for music progress in a town and a community that doesn’t always honor or even encourage progress or change of any sort.

Atkins, as I hope you remember, is the guitar legend who died in 2001. Beyond setting new standards and being a musical ambassador around the world, Atkins left behind a considerable musical legacy. As a producer, he signed and guided talents ranging from Waylon Jennings to Bobby Bare to Jim Reeves to Don Gibson. As a record label executive, he made RCA Nashville a continued powerhouse. Under his reign, he saw his beloved pop-ish Nashville Sound give way to Waylon’s Outlaw Country and beyond.

Chet is well-represented by a current, two-CD reissue, The Essential Chet Atkins. But the album of his that I most treasure on vinyl has never been available on CD and I think it should be. The Night Atlanta Burned is actually by The Atkins String Company, made up of Atkins on lead guitar, Johnny Gimble on mandolin, Lisa Silver on fiddle and Paul Yandell on rhythm guitar. Together they formed an exquisite chamber country ensemble, blending classical, country and bluegrass musics together. It is available now on MP3 and as a CD import on Raven from Australia. It would be certainly fitting if RCA Nashville kept it in print.

Our society, it’s been said, is overly fascinated with fame. Reality TV, American Idol and The Jerry Springer Show have all benefited from crackpots who are so gung-ho to get their face on the small screen that they willingly set themselves up as fools. One of the most cutting remarks you could make about a singer is to say that they’re more interested in fame than in being a credible artist. When Mindy McCready turned her string of misfortunes — an arrest, a beating from a boyfriend, a suicide attempt and an unwed pregnancy — into a tour of Larry King Live and The Oprah Winfrey Show, several people accused her of trading on tragedy in an attempt to jump-start a sagging career.

The push and pull of fame has been one of the most interesting aspects of Garth Brooks’ career. This week marks 15 years since Garth first introduced the idea of retiring during an interview in Billboard, where he insisted, “I can walk away from it.” Since then, even when he was touring endlessly, the idea that he might or might not stick around has been one of the most fascinating things about him. Can he walk away from it? It’s obviously difficult. He might not be touring, but his sudden re-emergence on the radio with “More Than a Memory,” which debuted at #4 this week on the MediaBase country chart in USA Today, shows that he can’t let go. He’s promised to take on a months-long promotional campaign to support his upcoming album, so the headlines are clearly still tugging.

For the record, the allure of fame is nothing new. I Love Lucy built much of its premise in the ‘50s on Lucy Ricardo’s relentless need to be in show biz. During this week 30 years ago, a Canadian man paid a visit to Chet Atkins at RCA in an attempt to get a recording deal. After the meeting, the man went into the street, stripped off his clothes, ripped up his traveler’s checks and flung them into the air. He was arrested for causing a disturbance, then arrested again the next day for attacking a hotel maid, pronouncing to police, “I’m going to be a star!”

At any time today, feel free to break into a round of Brad Paisley’s “Celebrity.”