Chet: King Picker and Pioneer of the Nashville Sound

Biographer Ribowsky (Hank) explores in this comprehensive account the life and legacy of country music legend Chet Atkins, who wrote, produced, and played on more than 1,000 songs, including 113 under his own name. Born in 1924 in small-town Luttrell, Tenn., Atkins was “excessively obsessed” with music from an early age—partly, Ribowsky suggests, because it served as an escape from his complicated relationship with his divorced parents. Atkins began his career in radio at Knoxville’s WNOX before moving on to singing and producing. Ribowsky highlights Atkins’s distinctive finger-picking technique (“a Band-Aid–like plectrum wrapped around his right thumb on the top strings, three-inch fingernails strumming below it, left hand frittering around on the fretboard with blinding speed”) and such career highlights as helping produce Elvis Presley’s early hit “Heartbreak Hotel.” Other milestones include signing some of the “biggest names to ever hit country music,” including Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, and shaping the so-called “Nashville sound,” which infused country with poppy tempos and helped revive the genre in the mid-1950s. Ribowsky’s studious research and unapologetically awestruck tone (Atkins was a “mountain Mozart who was touched by something that cannot really be explained... but [was] understood immediately upon being heard”) make this a worthy ode to an important figure in American pop culture. Country music fans will be engrossed. (Oct.)