Chet Atkins Plays The Beatles and Acoustic Guitar

No doubt about Chet Atkins being one of the all time greats on the guitar, but here’s a video of him playing the Beatles on a straight ahead acoustic guitar.

Although the acoustic is no stranger to Chet, it’s hard to find him playing  one, as he’s usually on an electric or a hybrid acoustic/electric.

I met Chet Atkins at Gruhn’s Guitars in Nashville back in the 90’s. He was there (with a crowd of people around him) trying out some acoustic guitars. I did go up to him about an hour later to shake his hand.

The respect level that this man had ran way past just the guitar, as he was instrumental in changing a lot of the productions of Country Music back in the day. Some will fault him for adding string sections, others will praise him for helping bring Country Music center stage to the masses.

The legendary album “Chester and Lester” (Les Paul) has a cool story that no one knows about that I will share with you..

My wife, who got her start singing with Les Paul, recalls the making of that album and a box of analog tapes that were sent to Les Paul by Chet. These were the masters and Chet, being the perfectionist that he was, asked Les to re-do some of his guitar solos.

My wife Lucy recalls Les asking her to open up the box, take out the tapes, seal them back up again and send it back to Chet without doing any of the overdubs Chet requested.

Chet would later say that he liked what Les did on the overdubs…

To this day, we don’t know if Chet was just being polite or really thought that Les indeed worked on the tracks… that Les Paul