Chet Atkins, who died on June 30th aged 77, was the first virtuoso guitarist in country music and the record producer largely responsible for devising the Nashville Sound, which put a new polish on country music in the 1960s and 70s.
The sounds he discovered on his guitar, refined during hours of solitary tinkering in his home studio, adorned records by Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and thousands of other artists, both country and pop. Many of them, such as Waylon Jennings or Don Gibson, he took to RCA, the label he served for more than 30 years.
Others, such as Jim Reeves and Charley Pride, he groomed in the studio until they emerged as hitmakers. Between sessions he would retire to his workshop and devise guitar arrangements of pop and jazz standards or of other people's hits, from Anne Murray's Snowbird to Boots Randolph's Yakety Sax. The combined legacy of his session work and his dozens of albums influenced a generation of guitarists as diverse as the American Duane Eddy, the French Marcel Dadi and the English rock musicians, George Harrison and Mark Knopfler.
Born into a poor farming family, Chet Atkins grew up in east Tennessee and rural Georgia. His father was a music teacher and his older brother, Jimmy, was a guitarist who worked with Les Paul. His father and brother left home while Chet was a boy, and he learned guitar by hunching over a crystal set, listening to country radio shows that might feature hot players. One such was Merle Travis, whose blunt, yet bluesy, thumb-and-finger picking made a lasting impression.
After high school he went to work on radio at WNOX in Knoxville, Tennessee. "I could play only three tunes: Seein' Nellie Home, Bye Bye Blues, When You And I Were Young, Maggie," he recalled to Nicholas Dawidoff, author of In the Country of Country, "so I gradually learned to play while I was making a living at it. I was original - my style sounded like two bad guitar players."
He spent several lean years on a succession of stations, made his first recording, Guitar Blues, for the Nashville independent label Bullet in 1946, and ended the decade playing with Mother Maybelle Carter and The Carter Sisters. Settling in Nashville, he was hired by RCA as a session guitarist, a role upgraded to consultant and, in 1957, producer.
Over the next couple of decades, Chet Atkins at RCA and his fellow producer Owen Bradley at Decca, showed they were prepared to think the unthinkable, casting out the backwoodsy banjos and fiddles and bringing in brass and string sections and vocal choruses. They took the homely niche-market product of country music, sanded off its rough edges, sprayed it with studio gloss and gave it the commercial sheen of mainstream pop.
"We took the twang out of it," Chet Atkins explained. "We tried to make hit records. What I do is listen a lot during a session and try to pick up some little something from the musicians that might make the record more commercial" - a guitar lick by Hank Garland, perhaps, or a clipped piano figure from Floyd Cramer, whose Last Date (1960) was one of Chet Atkins's early successes, along with Jim Reeves's He'll Have To Go (1959) and Skeeter Davis's The End of the World (1963).
Years later, when Chet Atkins's "countrypolitan" touch was no longer fashionable, he was often asked whether he and his fellow Svengalis had gone too far. There were no breast-beating recantations but, according to Dawidoff, "he still [had] reservations about how far afield he took country music from the relatively unadorned pre-war, down-home sound".
"We almost do lose our identity sometimes," Chet Atkins admitted. "But somebody'll come along and get us back where we need to be."
He gave up his vice-presidential job at RCA in 1982 and thereafter recorded for Columbia, but for much of the 1980s and 90s he devoted himself to playing golf and working only on projects that attracted or intrigued him: alliances with Ravi Shankar or the Boston Pops Orchestra, and occasional spots on Garrison Keillor's nostalgic radio show, A Prairie Home Companion.
Ever since 1970, when he won a Grammy for his album Me and Jerry, with Jerry Reed, Chet Atkins had enjoyed duet sessions with guitar-picking friends, and he added to his Grammy collection with awards for albums with Merle Travis (The Atkins-Travis Traveling Show, 1974); Les Paul (Chester and Lester, 1976); and Reed again (Sneakin' Around 1992); as well as for singles with Mark Knopfler and, on his own, his most recent Jam Man (1996).
He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 1973, the year he was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame. He also won a Pioneer Award from the Academy of Country Music in 1982, nine honours from the Country Music Association and innumerable Best Guitarist awards in magazines from Cash Box to Playboy.
He is survived by his wife of more than 50 years, Leona, a former country singer whom he met in his radio days; and a daughter Merle, named after his idol, Merle Travis.
Chester (Chet) Burton Atkins: born, 1924; died, June 2001