Moving on to KWTO in Springfield, Missouri, Atkins received his nickname, “Chet,” from station official Si Siman. There, Atkins made his first solo recording, “Guitar Blues,” for the local record label Bullet. He briefly joined WLW in Cincinnati in 1945, then worked with Johnnie & Jack in Raleigh, North Carolina, in early 1946, before moving to Chicago, where Red Foley, having left the WLS National Barn Dance to host the Grand Ole Opry’s NBC segment, The Prince Albert Show, hired Atkins and took him to Nashville. WNOX executive Lowell Blanchard heard Atkins’s guitar playing and began featuring him on the station’s popular weekday multi-artist country show, Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round, and Atkins broadened his repertoire though listening sessions in the station’s music library. Travis’s thumb-and-finger picking style fascinated Atkins, who created his own thumb-and-two-finger variation.Īfter attending high school in Georgia, Atkins landed a job at WNOX in Knoxville, fiddling for the team of singer Bill Carlisle and comic Archie Campbell. After the Atkinses divorced, Ida remarried, in 1932, and Chester began to learn guitar and fiddle, often playing with his brother and sister and their stepfather, Willie Strevel.Ī 1936 asthma attack forced Atkins to relocate to the improved climate at his father’s Georgia farm, where one night in the late 1930s he first heard Merle Travis playing guitar on WLW in Cincinnati. His father, James Atkins, was an itinerant music teacher who had previously been married, and his mother, Ida Atkins, sang and played piano.
Radio’s Immense InfluenceĬhester Burton Atkins grew up in the hills near the tiny, remote East Tennessee town of Luttrell. His immense influence on country, rock, and jazz musicians has lasted more than half a century, and many of the hit records he produced during his days at RCA are now classics.
No other country instrumentalist has achieved the same renown and respect as Chet Atkins.
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