Chet Atkins – Mr. Guitar: The Complete Recordings, 1955-1960

One talks about Chet Atkins in Nashville as if he were still among us — which makes it hard to assess his legacy. Some of it is beyond discussion: his importance in setting the modern country music industry on its course, for example, or his decency as a friend and family man. He was also inhumanly prolific: In chronological sequence, the 319 cuts on these seven CDs document only a part of his work over just five years, with session and production dates, tours, and business dealings beyond the scope of this package. (A magnificent hardcover folio book, packed with facts and illustrations, is included as well.)

Yet Mr. Guitar does raise questions about Atkins. Context is part of the problem: Most of these tracks were cut with the A-Team, Nashville’s top-call studio musicians at that time. These guys strove for polish and economy rather than the spontaneity and interactivity characteristic of other great rhythm sections. (Think of that delayed snare hit right before the second verse on Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, an inspired syncopation by Roger Hawkins of the Muscle Shoals band; A-Team drummer Buddy Harman, in contrast, almost never broke from his serene and steady groove.) They purred rather than roared. Their mission was to take country music uptown, to smooth its rough edges until some scribe was alert enough to identify the style as “countrypolitan.”

Atkins understood that this meant holding back rather than stretching out — just as well, because his doubts over his improvisational skills were well founded. By nature he was a fingerpicker, playing with a technique better suited to solo than to group settings. He loved jazz, yet he knew he could never blow like Herb Ellis; when nodding toward that style, he worked his lines out in advance and kept the performance short.

This premeditation was actually among his strengths. The unaccompanied treatment of “Johnson Rag”, complete with a meticulous whole-tone run, is just one example of Atkins’ determination to capture something fresh through pre-arrangement where attempts to extemporize freely could not. An examination of the standard “Yesterdays”, from the same 1957 session, shows that this approach could lead him to an agreeable fusion of jazz harmony with country phrasing, down to the sweet chimes and whammy-bar bend on the last chord.

Unfortunately, Atkins didn’t always execute his ideas with the same facility he showed in coming up with them. In fact, his phrasing could be stiff, almost arthritic. Every note of “Alice Blue Gown”, recorded in 1956, seems to cause him pain. Much of this has to do with the prickle and twang of his tone, which tended to thwart any attempts at nuance. Not infrequently, he would tackle some flashy piece and, as on his 1958 rendering of “Czardas”, pick a tempo so fast that he came off as overextending himself. On the other hand, at a more manageable pace, he seldom showed interest in building and resolving tension: On “Nagasaki”, Atkins ambles amiably through riffs Cab Calloway once ignited into hair-raising scats, and on “Muskrat Ramble”, even a key change isn’t enough to stir the flat-line feel.

Most problematic of all are the choral tunes, in which Atkins pared down to the barest basics to make room for studio singers who seem heavily sedated as they sleepwalk through charts that betray an apparent terror of syncopation. It’s hard to understand why the zombie-like delivery of lines such as “I’ll be carried to the new jail tomorrow” (from “The Prisoner Song”) or the slapstick slide whistle and bass thump that approximate a horrifying ocean catastrophe (on “Titanic”) weren’t heard as unintentionally hilarious.

One wonders further about the psychology of audiences in those days when Atkins and the A-Team tiptoe beyond the country realm. On June 27, 1957, for example, they cut the Mexican chestnut “El Cumbanchero”, the traditional jazz rave-up “Tiger Rag”, and Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz” — music from three distinct traditions, none of which receives more than a surface reading. There’s a sense here that they’re playing for listeners who would board a cruise ship, disembark for an hour of shopping at some Third World souvenir market, and come back feeling like world travelers.

None of this alters Atkins’ place in history. Nor should it diminish the respect his contributions still command. But this collection does suggest that it took maybe a little less back then than it would today to earn benediction in Music City as Mr. Guitar.