Tag: chet atkins

Tommy Emmanuel, ‘Windy and Warm’

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Guitar players are a competitive lot. You may be imagining your local music store filled with the sound of budding guitarists trying to impress their friends — and you and everyone else — with their cover of [enter one iconic “Blackbird” or “Stairway to Heaven”-like tune here]. Or you may be remembering those workshops you’ve attended where an audience member asks a “question” that’s a pointed answer to another audience member’s previous question … after the instructors already gave their advice. Or perhaps you’re having a flashback to that time a picker approached you and asked what make and model of guitar you play, but in that special way that is already judging you for your gear choices before even hearing your answer.

Our Artist of the Month, Tommy Emmanuel, is truly a guitar player’s guitar player. His audiences include some of the most dedicated, diehard, fanatical fans of the instrument. But you’ll never find him falling into the my-horse-is-bigger-than-your-horse routine; he even gives away his trade “secrets” freely in lessons and at workshops and camps. On his latest album, Accomplice One, he shares the limelight with collaborators and living legends, giving equal footing to and creating a solid foundation for each. It’s refreshing to watch someone with an undeniable, world-class talent direct focus to those he admires, rather than himself.

In this video of “Windy and Warm,” he does just that, paying tribute to Chet Atkins, who has inspired and influenced his playing since the very beginning. You can hear the awe and appreciation in every note. And there isn’t a single competitive pick stroke.

Tommy Emmanuel: Swinging for the Fences

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There’s a moment at the beginning of “Saturday Night Shuffle” — one of 16 duets from Tommy Emmanuel’s new album, Accomplice One — where the song’s guest, Jorma Kaukonen, turns to his host and says, “You’re a badass cat, man.”

It’s a nod of approval from one guitar great to another. Accomplice One is filled with those unplanned exchanges: a shout of encouragement here, a surprised laugh there. Raw and real-sounding, the album feels like a jam session between friends, mixing off-the-cuff solos and first-take performances with the virtuosity of an instrumentalist who’s been doing this for a long, long time.

Emmanuel began touring more than a half-century ago, hitting the Australian circuit as the youngest member of a family band. Now 62 years old, he still plays 300 shows a year. He doesn’t use a pick. He doesn’t use a regular amp. In a world whose most well-known guitarists — Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Chuck Berry, and the like — inevitably tend to be electric players, Emmanuel has remained true to the acoustic guitar. He’s the king of the unplugged.

With appearances from 20 guests, Accomplice One shows just how far the king’s empire extends. Americana poster boy Jason Isbell joins Emmanuel on the album’s opening track, a soulful reimagining of Doc Watson’s “Deep River Blues.” Bluegrass heavyweight Jerry Douglas stops by to swap solos on Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” Mark Knopfler, Ricky Skaggs, and Rodney Crowell all make their own cameos, too. Recorded in studios across the world, these songs nod to the core ingredients of American roots music — Emmanuel’s bread and butter — without losing their global perspective.

“I grew up with music that came out of America more than the music that came out of Australia,” says Emmanuel, who was raised in New South Wales. “It was a combination of sounds that were coming out of Nashville, Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, and New Orleans. I love all kinds of music, but that’s still the stuff that really touches my soul.”

Those childhood influences resurface on Accomplice One. “Saturday Night Shuffle” flips the Western twang of Merle Travis’s original on its head, sounding instead like the funky work of a New Orleans jazz band. Madonna’s dance-pop hit, “Borderline,” is turned into a lilting folksong with help from Amanda Shires. Emmanuel trades country licks with banjo phenom Charlie Cushman and blues-rock guitarist J.D. Simo on “Wheelin’ & Dealin’,” then bounces between Celtic shuffles and barn-burning bluegrass on his Clive Carroll collaboration, “Keepin’ It Real.”

It’s during “Djangology,” though, that the album truly goes international, with Emmanuel and his guests looking far beyond the Lower 48 for inspiration. A tribute to Django Reinhardt’s laid-back, jazzy phrasing, the song was recorded alongside Frank Vignola and Vinny Ranioloa in Cuba, during the middle of the country’s first-ever guitar camp.

“I was teaching 120 international students — everyone from 18 years to 80 years — for four days, and playing shows at night,” Emmanuel remembers. “One of the days, we went to the studio where they recorded Buena Vista Social Club. All the original microphones were there. We brought in some plastic chairs, and all the students sat in the main orchestral room. We had mics set up in front of us, and we worked out the arrangement in front of the kids. Then we recorded it twice and played it back, so they could hear it. The second take was the best, so that was the one we kept. It was very simple.”

Remember Santana’s Supernatural and its biggest hit, “Smooth,” which paired the guitar legend with Matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas? That song was inescapable for years, but it never truly sounded believable. Did anyone actually think Santana and Rob Thomas hung out together? Could anyone imagine them co-leading a guitar camp in Cuba?

That’s what makes Accomplice One so compelling: It’s believable. There’s fret noise on these tracks. There’s studio chatter between the musicians, all of whom are fans of one another. During the Cuban recording, you can hear someone tapping a foot on the studio floor, unable to resist keeping time with the music. The imperfections that would’ve been bulldozed by Supernatural‘s high-gloss production are, instead, put on a pedestal and celebrated by Emmanuel, whose album emphasizes feeling and intention over perfection.

That said, there’s a good bit of perfection here, as well. Emmanuel attributes his refined playing to a lifelong Chet Atkins obsession, which brought him face-to-face with — and eventually under the wing of — his idol during Atkins’ later years.

“Chet lived a life with a lot of great experience,” says Emmanuel, who became friends with the guitarist in 1980. “He had a lot of great people around him. He didn’t just make great music; he made the people around him great, too. He taught me a lot, not just about music, but about human nature. That’s the stuff I can write about.”

Nearly two decades before they met in Nashville, Emmanuel first head Atkins on the radio in 1963.

“It was a sound that I knew, deep in my soul, was what I wanted to make,” he remembers. “I wanted to sound like that. I just wanted to be like that. I think it’s nature’s way that all of us start out emulating somebody.”

If Emmanuel’s approach to the guitar began as emulation, it’s since grown into something signature. Like a one-man band, he’s learned to simultaneously pluck out a song’s melody, underscore it with a walking bass line and beef up the mix with accompanying chords. Listening to “Deep River Blues,” it’s easy to assume that Emmanuel and Isbell are tag-teaming the song’s guitar duties, filling its verses with blue notes and densely stacked chords. But that’s Emmanuel playing alone, with Isbell opting to leave his guitar in the case and, instead, channel his inner soul singer.

“When Jason started to sing that song, you’ve gotta imagine the chicken skin I got,” says Emmanuel, happy to refocus the spotlight on Isbell’s voice rather than his own playing. “I was doing the thumb-picking Doc Watson part and, when you add his voice to mix, it’s totally a soulful experience. It’s real, and that’s what I love about playing music.”

The feeling appears to be mutual. Accomplice One is filled with the sympathetic interplay of musicians who want to be there and that’s what elevates it above the usual catalog of guitar-heavy duets. Filled with covers, originals, (“Rachel’s Lullaby,” a Beatles-inspired song written for Emmanuel’s baby daughter, is one of his most compelling compositions in years.) and top-shelf playing, the album is for guitar nerds and casual Americana fans, alike. It’s the sound of a roots music lifer who, a half-century into the game, is still swinging for the fences.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

Cary Morin Picks His Piece

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“Let there be no question of who’s wrong and who’s right. There should be no compromise. We all stand up and fight in the dawn’s early light,” Cary Morin sings on “Dawn’s Early Light,” written in support of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe during last year’s protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

“A friend of mine was doing a show [at Standing Rock with the Indigo Girls] and she had asked me, just in passing, if I would write a song for the Standing Rock movement,” Morin explains. “I felt like there were a lot of people writing songs about that, at that time, and I wanted this one to be a little different and stand out a little bit, so it was really more concentrated on the activism, in general, and not so much Standing Rock, but just the whole idea of people coming together to promote clean water.”

“Dawn’s Early Light” is one of the poignant original songs featured on Morin’s latest album, Cradle to the Grave. In order to lend his perspective, Morin tapped into his experience growing up as a Crow tribal member near the Missouri River in Montana.

“When you think about roots music in America, it’s a culmination of so many things. It’s all the stuff blended together, much like the culture in this country is people from all over the world that end up here and create a unique situation,” Morin explains. “With my Native heritage, I could say that I’m really the only finger-style Crow guy on the entire planet. That’s unique. But we all can say that, to some degree. We all have unique things that make us who we are, and I’m really thankful to have grown up in the area that I did, surrounded by the people that I did.”

Morin came to the guitar by way of the piano, which he first began playing around the age of 10. When he picked up a guitar a couple years later, he was enamored. He played by ear, emulating the sounds he loved from his parents’ and brother’s record collection: Chet Atkins, James Taylor, Cat Stevens and Neil Young.

“I grew up in the ‘70s so, at that time, [there was] no Internet, there was very little TV, mostly radio. And the local music scene was really pretty folky and a lot of bluegrass, so I really grew up in the pursuit of flat-picking and [was influenced by] popular bluegrass bands at the time — David Bromberg, Norman Blake, Tony Rice,” says Morin. “I had really fantastic examples of what the music should be, but then I kind of mashed everything up into a combination of bluegrass and finger-style stuff, mostly from Leo Kottke, which turned into this thing that I do now.”

Morin moved to Colorado just out of high school and formed the Atoll, a world-beat band that he toured with for more than 20 years. “I played electric guitar [in the band], but I continued to mess around with the acoustic guitar,” he says. “Once I stopped doing [the band], my focus was really just acoustic guitar and a lot of practicing — just hours and hours of sitting around and playing. To this day, I try to play quite a lot. I’ve been introduced to open-D tuning by a friend of mine, and it took me about a year to get it going and figure out just the basics of it. But then, once I got it going, I just found it to be really fascinating, and I continue to learn new stuff all the time with that tuning. I just love the way it sounds. There’s a fullness and richness to it that I can’t seem to get out of standard tuning.”

Morin’s reconnection with the acoustic guitar led to the release of his most recent string of solo acoustic albums. Cradle to the Grave is the fourth in the series showcasing his adept fingerpicking style and warm, inviting vocals. An amalgamation of bluegrass, country, rock ’n’ roll, and blues, the album features eight original tunes and three cover songs: Willie Brown’s “Mississippi Blues” and, perhaps more surprisingly, Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and Phish’s “Back on the Train.”

“Phish is one of my favorite bands … I think that Trey’s playing has just really been inspiring and just the whole feel of the band and the approach they take. There’s so much freedom in what they do, and I used that as an example with my band, when I was rolling around playing clubs and festivals,” Morin explains. “A lot of times we’d play five songs without stopping. We’d just roll from tune to tune, and the whole point of that band was really dance music, just to provide an outlet for people to go out and have fun and dance.”

Morin uses the same ethos in his current performances touring behind his solo efforts.

“As a solo player, I can do whatever I want. I can play in whatever key. I can speed things up or slow it down, or just kind of make things up as I go along. And I really dig that freedom to just do whatever I want on stage,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll try stuff and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does, it’s a great feeling, and then it’s gone forever.”

While solo spontaneity on stage leads to such ephemeral moments, Morin has a solidified team off-stage that serves as his backbone — and they’re not going anywhere. From recording to promotion, it’s an organic, family affair.

“What I like about these four records [is that] the recordings are all done live in the studio with no headphones. I’ll sit and play these songs, and just play and play and play them, and a friend of mine has recorded all these albums,” Morin explains. “We’ve gotten together, I think, a pretty successful team with Maple Street Music and [my wife] promoting the live shows and the recordings, and Rich [Werdes] recording them, and we have the same person that’s been mastering and mixing the CDs, too. It’s just like the perfect combination of people and I like to think that I promote one guy, one guitar. People still are interested in such a thing … I just really enjoy being able to stand on stage by myself being able to do what I do.”

Photo credit: Timothy Duffy

Counsel of Elders: Jessi Colter on the Spiritual Journey

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Jessi Colter’s musical legacy has long been a balancing act between “the outlaw” and “the lady,” but there’s another side — a third — that informed her identity in even greater measure than those two descriptors. The daughter of a Pentecostal minister mother — that’s right, mother — Colter (whose birth name is Mirriam Johnson) grew up in the church and held faith close to her heart. But as her musical ability crystallized and caught the attention of rock ‘n’ roll guitarist Duane Eddy, who would go on to become her first husband, and later Nashville musician and producer Chet Atkins, Colter found herself in a world that didn’t always make room for those beliefs. That became doubly so when she married singer Waylon Jennings and struggled with a love that was at turns exhilarating and at others tumultuous.

Colter has proved throughout her career that identity isn’t an either/or categorization. It’s a prism refracting various aspects of a person’s many parts depending on the light. She is all the things that helped her rise to fame in the country world — a member of the Outlaw movement (along with Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Tompall Glaser), a hit single writer for candid tunes like “I’m Not Lisa,” a gold record holder — and an equally devote Christian. The lesson was not about finding a world that made room her faith, but about making sure she created that space in herself. The rest would follow. And it did. She released the spiritual album Mirriam in 1977.

Colter returns this year with another spiritual album, The Psalms. Recorded with friend and collaborative partner Lenny Kaye, the project puts music to David’s Biblical words and follows her last studio album, 2006’s Out of the Ashes. She also used that creative momentum to pen a biography with David Ritz, appropriately titled An Outlaw and a Lady. In it, she chronicles her early days in the church, her wild romance with Jennings, and how music — through it all — pulled her disparate parts together. Songs, like the blessing of breath, connected it all to something greater.

In your biography, you return again and again to your mother and the spiritual foundation she laid in your life. What does that mean to you now, reflecting back?

I realize the importance of heritage; I am so appreciative and grateful for what I was raised in. I’ve come full circle, and I don’t know exactly what to say except the most important thing that I have in my life — with all the great experiences I’ve been given — is to keep my faith. I just feel like we’re eternal beings and what we do here is certainly part of our humanity, but our humanity will decrease and our spirit will increase, so people who don’t keep one foot in this world and one in the next are not playing with a full deck.

Speaking of heritage, your parents named you Mirriam after Moses and Aaron’s sister. Did you ever view the music you wrote as containing her prophetic quality?

No, I really didn’t. When I wrote Mirriam, it was because I was returning to my faith and it was very joyous and it was working in me. I expressed it in song. None of it has been pre-determined. The way The Psalms has come and the way this book has come, I have to believe is supernaturally designed. I really do think it has been guided by God. Who would think an album we started 10 years ago would come out right before Easter, and the book would come out at Passover? The High Holy Days! Who would’ve figured that out? I have no manager; I don’t have a booking agent. Lenny Kaye and I just collaborated and here it is.

In keeping with that sentiment, your book details how much more you received once you relinquished control and gave yourself over to a higher power. How do you let it all go? That’s so difficult when we, as humans, want to have control over something.

Oh, I know. Our self-will is our greatest enemy. This wasn’t deeply discussed in the book, but when I was about 28, I had ambition. I’d been driven and drawn to music, loved it. I’d written, continued to write. When I did “I’m Not Lisa,” I had two albums ahead. I was at this point where my ambition was really frustrating me, and I don’t know what clicked in my brain or my spirit to say, “You know what? I give it up. And if this something you want me to give up, I’ll give it up.” It hurt. I could feel it in my heart.

Right, for an ambitious person that would be painful.

Yeah, and it wasn’t six months that I had a gold record, and it was a large green light. God gives us desires to fulfill them, and I think all he wants us to do is to say, “I need you to help me on this, because I can’t do it.” It doesn’t make us less, it makes us more, because we get past ourselves to get what we truly need or want or what we’re destined for.

He made us. When the breath goes out of a human being … I saw it when I lost my dearest husband Waylon. When God’s breath went out of him, it wasn’t Waylon anymore, and where we get off that we’re in charge, I don’t even know. But it’s a problem. It’s going to be His way so you may as well line up, is my theory. But I had to learn it. It’s a lifetime project.

Part of that learning, for me, involves taking attention off yourself and focusing it on other people or issues, so it’s interesting that you open with Psalm 150, which you’ve stated holds significance for you for that very reason. How did you choose what to include and how to arrange it?

You know, we didn’t have any big design. There are some that I go back to more than others. Of course, the 23rd Psalm is possibly the greatest poem ever written.

Is that your favorite?

It’s inscribed in my home, and I walk by it at different times and I’ll see different things. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” I’ve heard versions that replace it with, “The Lord is my shepherd, that’s all I want,” which is a very cool way to think. David was so universal; his perspective was so uplifting. Then I discovered in the Jerusalem museum — when Waylon took me to Israel — the most recently unearthed (what they believe to be) Psalm of David in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s David’s last Psalm and it’s a self-portrait of him. His brothers were tall and handsome, and yet the prophet came looking for him. What a story. He was a prophet, a warrior, they say a musician, a poet; he spoke priestly and he was a king. He’s very important to me because I love this man and I look forward to meeting him, but these Psalms are just magic because, if you get into them, they will read you. I’m stirred every day and I look to it for guidance. The spirit never dies — an eternal thing never dies. They’re very alive.

I think that’s language, too. That’s part of its power.

Yes, exactly.

But you’ve expressed how much writing means a great deal to you, so I found it curious that you would make an album using someone else’s words.

They will forever be David’s, but they’re in my heart, so I draw from them. It was challenging because, when I compose, I usually compose the lyrics and the words at the same time, and to have all that taken away and to try and figure … there’s no rhythm here, so it’s just free-flowing prose and very challenging for a musician, and challenging for those [musicians] Lenny added. We did it slowly. Sometimes it was two years before I’d get another song.

And it got stuck in every CD player I played! I thought, “What are these discs that Lenny was sending me?” I was forced to listen — most people don’t go around listening to themselves — and I found it would center me. I drive a lot, because I’m out from Phoenix, in horse ranch country. I thought, “You know, I’m going to try listening in different moods to see what it does,” and it does something! It will center you. It draws on your spirit and relieves your humanity. We’re a spirit man with a body and a soul, I believe. I love the way Dylan said it; he said, “Let’s strengthen the things that will remain.” The spiritual is the thing that will remain.

Moving back to some of your earlier recordings. You said “Don’t Let Him Go” represented a specific feeling for you at the time and wasn’t a feminist anthem. It does seem like women take on the work — as artists — of representing so much more than themselves. They become indicative of bigger causes. How have you tried to strike a balance between individuality and larger movements?

I’ve never thought about it. I go with the path I’m given. I’ll tell you the truth: I was born the daughter of a Pentecostal minister in a Mormon culture, and I think early on something caused my brain to understand — maybe I couldn’t interpret it with words — that I was not necessarily a part of the greater surrounding, beliefs, or whatever. All my friends were Mormon, my boyfriend was Mormon. They’re a wonderful culture to be raised in. It was a wonderfully innocent, sheltered life. It gave me more a sense of being a minority, but I never suffered from it. It only propelled me into what I was supposed to be. I don’t know how else to relate that.

You’re able to stand strong no matter the setting.

Right, but I never felt any kind of rebellion. Some of my friends were Apache Indians, most of them were Mormons, and there was never a breach between us. We didn’t go to church together, but that was about it.

So there was still a sense of community?

Right.

It feels like we’ve lost some part of that.

I know. All these differences … it’s almost like a spirit of division. Truly, if we experience each other and keep that open … I love learning about other cultures and being part of other cultures.

Right, but there are some who take that as a threat. By learning about something else or the existence of something else, it somehow waters down their own subjectivity.

I know.

We’ve seen this resurgence of independently honest female musicians in country, like Margo Price, Kacey Musgraves, Amanda Shires, and more. What do you think it is about the present moment that has lent itself to this wave?

I think things run their course and this “other thing” has run its course. It’s time for new flowers to bloom. The season is over, to me, of a lot of the mediocrity, of “Everybody can sing, and everybody can look good.” How boring does that get? It takes a freshness that I don’t know that you can keep doing the same thing with the same producers. We’re already seeing, as you say, coming over the horizon …

Yes, the candor that you’ve long expressed in your songs is front and center once again.

Well, thank you.

MIXTAPE: William Tyler’s Guitar Heroes

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Growing up in Nashville, there were guitar heroes pretty much on every corner. There still are, and a lot of them are younger than me. A lot more are older. I wanted to share some tunes by some of my favorite players then, now, and at points in between. — William Tyler

Chet Atkins — "The Entertainer"
When I was in elementary school, we took a music appreciation class where our teacher played us a good amount of Scott Joplin. He was one of my first music heroes and I have always remained drawn to interpretations of his work. Naturally, I had to include a Chet Atkins song on this mix, right? Mr. Guitar? So here is his take on "The Entertainer."

Ry Cooder — "Why Don't You Try Me"
The intro to this song sums up almost everything I find so sublime about Ry Cooder. The way he is able to invert chords up and down the neck in such a fluid way, almost like the fluctuations of a choir. And, of course, perfect tone.

Nic Jones — "Planxty Davis"
There are a quite a few great pickers and friends out there (I think Nathan Salsburg, among them) who would agree with me in saying that this is one of the all-time great guitar instrumentals. Sort of like "Sleepwalk" by Santo and Johnny for the British folk crowd.

Mary Halvorson — "Cheshire Hotel"
Mary Halvorson is one of our great contemporary guitar visionaries. She uses classical jazz voicing and method, but veers into the outer regions just as quickly and does it with so much expression and originality.

Norman Blake — "Northern Winds"
This is a special one for me. It is in fact on a Steve Earle album called Train a Comin', but Earle obviously respects Norman Blake's playing enough to give him his own track. I remember hearing this as a kid because my dad had this record and I was totally mesmerized by this song. It's probably the first time I ever heard a guitar instrumental and thought, "I wish I could write something like that."

Robert Wilkins — "That's No Way to Get Along"
This got reworked by the Rolling Stones as "Prodigal Son" and it led me back to the original. Wilkins is one of my favorite of the Delta blues players.

Etta Baker — "Carolina Breakdown"
The Mississippi Delta styles of playing have always been an influence on me, but the Piedmont style of the Carolinas and Georgia was always a bigger one. Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, Gary Davis, Elizabeth Cotten, and Etta Baker — Piedmont players always had a grasp of ragtime that fascinated me and offered a good lesson in learning a style of counterpoint as a finger picker. I love this song. It originally appeared on a compilation called Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians.

Sonny Sharrock — "Blind Willie"
One of my favorite guitar records ever is Black Woman by avant jazz legend Sonny Sharrock. It's mostly a barrage of frantic ensemble playing, like Albert Ayler with a guitar. But this short instrumental serves as a beautiful interlude, and it reminds me of an Appalachian dulcimer tune.

Joe Pass — "Autumn Leaves"
When I took some rudimentary jazz lessons years ago, "Autumn Leaves" was one of the first songs I learned. Joe Pass is, to me, the noble giant of solo jazz guitar, and this is his stunning version of that tune.

Sandy Bull — "Carmina Burana Fantasy"
Sandy Bull was another important formative influence on my playing. He had a knack for reinterpreting pieces of music, sometimes on an unorthodox instrument. Here is his take on Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" or, as someone else described it, "the most overused piece of music in history."

Luiz Bonfa — "Scottish March"
I had to include something by Bonfa, whose Solo in Rio is another all-time favorite guitar record. This piece has the same kind of modal drone that you hear in Sharrock's "Blind Willie," and I love the middle section where Bonfa uses the body of the guitar to imitate marching drum sounds.

Noveller — "Concrete Dreams"
Noveller is the name under which guitarist Sarah Lipstate composes and performs. I wanted to close this mix with a piece by a guitar player who is using the guitar to paint whole sound environments. Her work is meditative and haunting,

Photo credit: Angelina Castillo

Merle Travis: The Urban Hillbilly Guitar Hero

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Welcome back to In Memoriam, a monthly series that chronicles Americana legends. So often, one giant is memorialized in their field while the others are displaced to historical footnotes. In Memoriam will spotlight influential musicians that are fading from the collective conscious and commemorate them appropriately. This month, Merle Travis.

Merle Travis is one of the greatest country musicians of all time. His renown does not match his influence. Born in rural Kentucky, Travis overcame nearly insurmountable poverty and went on to become one of the most sought-after and revered guitar pickers of all time. He wrote many of country music’s most enduring classics. His guitar design innovations are legendary. Yet, he’s often only remembered as a footnote to the Chet Atkins story.

Travis was born in 1917 in Roseburg, KY. His family were hard luck coal miners and his early life inspired some of his most well-known songs — “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon” both chronicle the lives of Kentucky coal miners. At 18, Travis won a talent contest in nearby Indiana that launched his life as a professional musician. He played guitar in the Georgia Wildcats before settling in Cincinnati. There, he performed on WLW radio from 1938 until 1943. Chet Atkins first heard Travis on WLW in 1939 and was inspired to adapt his fingerpicking techniques.

Merle Travis first flirted with national fame after settling in Los Angeles in 1943. Los Angeles in the 1940s was one of the largest country music communities in the U.S. — Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, and Gene Autry were some of Los Angeles's biggest stars. Thousands of the country’s best honky-tonkers convened on the bourgeoning metropolis. In this throng of urban hillbillies, Travis shined bright. Early on, megastar Tex Ritter took the young Travis under his wing. When the Musicians' Union kept Travis from steady work, Ritter hired him for a tour. When the Union put the kibosh on the tour, Ritter gave him $100. The two collaborated for the rest of their lives. Many of Ritter’s 1940s and '50s albums feature Merle.

[Photo credit: Cliff / CC BY-NC.]

Travis also had luck with television. Through this brand new medium, he found steady work playing for six hours a day five days a week on CBS — an unheard of feat by today’s standards. He also made time to front his own bands and act in B-movies. He finally signed a record deal with Capitol in 1946. It was a fruitful period in Merle’s often tumultuous life. His name was not on the marquees, but he was making a lot of money.

Travis cast a long shadow because he was a triple threat: a peerless guitar player, a brilliant songwriter, and an innovative guitar designer.

In fact, Merle Travis redefined country guitar. His trademark picking pattern was based on a Western Kentucky regional style that developed in the early 20th Century. It incorporated a syncopated bass pattern plucked with the thumb on the first and third count while the index and middle fingers played the melody on the higher strings. It created a huge sound, and mimicked the rhythm and feel of a full band. The technique is now known as Travis picking and it is instantly recognizable.

Like all great players, Merle sought out great musicians in other genres. He incorporated elements of ragtime and jazz into his music — the preeminent bluesman Blind Blake also influenced him. Artists like Chet Atkins have expanded on Travis’s techniques, but none were as groundbreaking. It is a timeless and enduring approach to the guitar that will never stale.

Merle Travis signed with the young Capitol Records in 1946 and had a string of self-penned hits. He tackled the topic of displaced veterans in “No Vacancy,” even while he found success with novelty songs like “Divorce Me COD” and “So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed.” In a strange twist, most of his own hits during this period did not showcase his sought-after guitar skills. Instead, the recordings highlighted his smooth vocals. In 1947, he released Folk Songs of the Hills. At the time, it was an anomaly in his catalog. It flopped, but has aged well. Merle’s most enduring hits — “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon” — come from this Kentucky-inspired folk album. Later in life, he reflected on his Capitol records and said, “I had a streak of good luck, but never took recording seriously. All of my records sounded very much alike. I just had fun making them.” You'd be hard pressed to find anyone that agrees.

[Photo credit: Thomas Hawk / Foter.com / CC BY-NC.]

Though it is an oft-disputed fact, history indicates that Merle Travis designed the first solid body guitar. In 1947, he met Paul Bigsby who is now known for his whammy bar contributions. At the time, he was a motorcycle machinist. Travis, Bigsby, Leo Fender, and Les Paul all drank together. (All four are often credited with inventing the solid body guitar.) In 1947, Bigsby built a steel guitar for a friend, and it impressed Travis. He fell in love with the sustain. He wondered why his hollow body guitar didn’t have the same sound. “I came to the conclusion it was all because the steel guitar was solid,” Travis later wrote. “Another pet peeve of mine was changing strings on a guitar. When I lay my guitar down in my lap to change strings, the ones that were on the bottom are on the wrong side. They're awkward to change. I wondered why not put all he pegs on one side.” Travis sketched out a guitar for Bigsby, who went to work on it. It is now cited by most historians as the first solid body guitar. Bigsby built a handful of other guitars, but they are rare and now sell for upwards of $40,000. When Bigsby’s guitar tail pieces took off, he couldn’t handle the workload. When an order came in, he farmed out the work to his good friend Leo Fender. Although Travis’s claims were often doubted, Fender’s former vice president and the MusicMan amp creator Forrest White confirmed the story with Rolling Stone. Merle Travis beat both Les Paul and Leo Fender to the punch.

There are two reasons Merle Travis isn’t a household name. First, he always followed the money instead of the fame. He focused on steady work and playing on other artists' recordings, instead of on his material. The second reason is his personal life: In the 1950s, his drinking caught up with him. He was unreliable as a sideman and incapable of fronting his own band. He was arrested countless times for drunk driving on his motorcycle. In 1956, he pistol whipped his then-wife and held her hostage. His best friend Joe Maphis called the cops, and there was a standoff at the Travis house. It appears charges were never filed, but it was a horrendous stain on an already tarnished career. He managed to scrape by in the 1950s with a small part in the film From Here to Eternity and on the hype of Ernie Ford’s successful version of “Sixteen Tons.” His good friend Hank Thompson also kept him busy in the studio, although not on the road. The 60s didn’t look much better. Travis kicked them off with a narcotics arrest. Country radio and fandom all but forgot him by 1965.

Luckily, in 1968, Merle moved to Nashville at the behest of Chet Atkins, and his luck began to change. Travis and Atkins recorded an album together — The Atkins-Travis Travelling Show — that won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. Travis quit drinking and began recording again in earnest. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band even featured him on their ground-breaking album Will the Circle Be Unbroken, introducing him to another generation of traditional and New Grass pickers. He signed with CHD records in 1976 and his most prolific studio years followed. He was up for his second Grammy in 1983 when he died of a massive heart attack. By all accounts, he died a happy man, having overcome his struggles.

Although Merle Travis’s commercial success never matched his influence, he left an indelible mark on country music. You can hear it coming through Chet Atkins in the Nashville Sound of the '60s. His imprint is in Scotty Moore’s biting solos on Elvis Presley’s records. His clear tone is in George Harrison’s weeping guitar. Perhaps the most fitting homage to such a profound musician is that two other country music greats, Merle Watson and Glen Travis Campbell, were named in his honor. You may not know the name Merle Travis, but all your favorite musicians do.

Lede photo credit: Michael Ochs