Chet Atkins Chet Atkins - Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop

he was doing,” Chet told Anderson. “I thought he was playingwith three fingers, so I started playing with three fingers.As it turned out, the style I played was sort of a pseudoclassicstyle, with the hands in a slightly different position.”The fiddle, however, earned Chet his first significant employmentin the medium that mattered most in those days,radio. A seventeen-year-old dropout, Chet found work as fiddlerfor comic Archie Campbell and singer Bill Carlisle onKnoxville’s 10,000 watt WNOX in 1942. When America enteredWWII later that year, Chet was given a 4-F defermentdue to chronic asthma. His guitar playing came to light informally,and station executive Lowell Blanchard offered Chet afeature spot on the ‘Mid-Day Merry Go Round.’ Blanchardencouraged Chet to learn as many kinds of songs as possible,telling him, “You’re gonna make it big someday, Chester,and you’ll need every song you can get.” Blanchard even gavehim a key to the station so he could listen to transcriptiondiscs at night and on weekends. “My brother (Jim) startedsending me ‘air checks’ of their performances so I could playand copy Les Paul’s choruses,” Chet told Dave Kyle (VintageGuitar, Vol. 9 No. 11, August 1995). “There were some transcriptionsof George Barnes at the radio station and I’d copyand memorize some of his choruses; ‘It Had to Be You,’ thingslike that.”It was during his three years at WNOX that Chetwoodsheded extensively and broadened his repertoire in away that paved the path for his ‘country-politan’ style in subsequentdecades. It was also during his WNOX days that drummerHerbie Fields introduced him to the vibrola, later knownas the vibrato or ‘whammy bar.’ A 1943 photo shows Chetwith a Martin C-2 archtop on which he had added the earliestof many such devices which became trademarks of hisstyle.When he turned 21, Chet was nudged out of the WNOXnest by his mentor, Lowell Blanchard, who felt it was timehis young charge test his style at a more powerful station.Chet agreed and spent some six months at Travis’s old station,WLW, before being fired on Christmas Eve, 1945. “Audiencesweren’t nearly as sophisticated as they are now,” Chetexplained to Dave Kyle when asked about being fired. “Backin those days, there were a lot of songs about death andlooking for a soldier’s grave and all these terrible bloodcurdlingsongs...I didn’t do any of that stuff. I played guitar and8