Oh, When the saints...
Stuart’s take on how Chet Atkins might play this popular tune will challenge your fingers.
This month I’m starting a new series focusing on the great Nashville and country style guitarists and it seems fitting to begin with perhaps the greatest of them all – Chester Burton ‘Chet’ Atkins. There are few fingerstyle guitarists who can enthrall both the guitar playing audience and the wider public, but through his work as a picker, producer and writer Chet Atkins became a superstar of the country world. In fact, his influence within the genre was so great that he actually turned the music around to become popular again.
Chet Atkins was born in Luttrell, Tennessee on June 20, 1924 into real poverty. Indeed, by the time he was playing electric guitar in his teens he used to have to travel miles to find a power supply for his amp, as his home did not have electricity. Atkins’ style was shaped by the great Merle Travis and his famed ‘Travis picking’ technique. However, it’s important to note that Atkins took the technique and made it his own: whereas Travis would use just the thumb and first finger to pick the strings, Atkins employed his thumb, first, second and third fingers which gave him a considerable picking range within the style. Other great influences on his playing were Django Reinhardt, Les Paul and later his friend and frequent musical accomplice, Jerry Reed. Combine those influences with inherent genius and a phenomenal eye for detail, and the result was the incomparable Chet Atkins.
Atkins’ list of achievements is too long to list here. But he started off performing with June Carter and the Carter family, had his first hit in the early ’50s with a legendary arrangement of Mr Sandman, designed guitars for Gretsch and went on to head up the Nashville division of the RCA Victor record label, producing and playing on hundreds of chart hits and helping to develop the so-called ‘Nashville Sound’.
The Chet Atkins style is a challenge if you are new to it – at its core is the coordination between the thum picking basslines normally alternating octaves or 5ths on the bass strings while the picking-hand fingers plucking melody notes on the top three. I’ve created this arrangement of When The Saints Go Marching In to include many of his key devices, from the thumbpicked bass to challenging open-string runs and barre chords. It’s a phenomenal way of playing and I’d urge all guitarists – acoustic or electric – to give it a go. Good luck, and have fun!
NEXT MONTH Stuart looks at the incredible picking style of the wonderful Jerry Reed
at the core of the chet atkins style is the coordination between the thumb and picking hand fingers