One guy's take
...because there was this kid named Chet, who grew up poor in rural Tennessee, and who loved the sound of the guitar from an early age. He liked it all, but especially the hot jazz of the Hungarian-gone-Paree Django Reinhardt and the intricate contrapuntal fingerpicking of Kentucky-gone-Cincinnati-gone-Nashville-gone-Hollywood player Merle Travis.
Chet didn't like fingerpicking just because it sounded busy and fancy. He liked it because it let a single player combine bass lines, harmonies, and melodies into a complete self-orchestrated whole. All the time Chet was teaching himself to play a little like Merle, he was also learning how the nuts and bolts of music fit together, and on a deep level how music works.
Through the 40s, he honed his skills in the Hot Club of Knoxville, playing a hybrid western swing/gypsy jazz style with Henry Haynes and Kenneth Burns, among others. By the time he got on the radio, he confused people. He said it took him awhile to catch on because people assumed they were hearing two guys play together badly, rather than one guy playing stuff they had ever before heard coming from one guitar before.
Genius and talent were combined in Chet with ambition to make something of himself. He came to wider circles of attention through the late forties and into the fifties, playing with Hank Williams, the Carter family, the Grand Ol' Opry, the reigning royalty of country music. They recognized his talent and rewarded it; he embarked on two simultaneous careers.
In one, he developed, codified, and popularized maybe the most sophisticated guitar style we've ever known. It combines elements of almost everything into a protean, fluid, pliable form that lets a proficient player render music in all its dimensions. It's technically demanding – but technique is not its point. Absolute mastery of the entire instrument from end to end is just a coincidental benefit: the purpose is self-expressive freedom, and the promise of becoming "the compleat musician."
In his other career, he shaped and molded country music as he found it into a smoother, more accessible, and much more popular form. Like it or loathe it, without Chet's cosmopolitan ear and guiding hand, it's not a slam-dunk that country would have grown from its demographically isolated hillbilly roots to become the national music of America.
In both careers, he generously helped many others in ways we may never fully know. He befriended the young and hopeful – and the old and disappointed. He jumpstarted the careers of promising new artists – and supported those who had passed from the limelight. He worked with inventors, guitar companies, record producers, artists, and anyone who wanted to play like Chet. He also worked with, admired, and supported players very unlike him.
And his guitar playing affected EVERYone. Those who came along behind adopted what they could of it. Parts of it morphed into rockabilly. Parts morphed into crucial elements of Beatlesque pop. Clearly it had an enormous influence on country music. Fifty years on, players inspired by Chet – and players inspired by players inspired by Chet – have adapted, extended, and diversified his basic approach and his technique in surprising and delightful ways. Styles of guitar once disparate and isolated – classical, jazz, gypsy, country, pop – are now fused. The spark passes to new generations, and they do things we haven't heard before.
That's the way living traditions stay vital, and Chet would have loved it. At the same time, no one forgets where it started. At times it seems every picker at CAAS could play any Chet tune on demand, as the common language of Chetopia. At the very least, players prove their worthiness by demonstrating their command of Chet basics – then they may innovate. It's a guild, with apprentices and masters.
Still. So a guy developed and refined a style of guitar playing, became an executive at a record company, and was nice to a few people. Why the reverence?
There's reverence in Nashville because he "built that city." The industry he shaped turned Nashville into Music City USA, and it's hard to imagine Nashville today without it. Certainly hundreds of thousands of jobs down through the years – in all the industries it takes to build and run not only the music business, but a major city – owe something to the success one fingerpickin' kid had with a guitar.
But it's more fundamental than that. Playing in anything like Chet's style requires intensive, ongoing discipline. I spoke with several players about how much practice it takes: it's multiple hours, every day, for years. Some barely put the guitar down during waking hours. The example Chet provided – and the discipline these players have adopted to turn inspiration into reality – has been near the center of their lives. CAAS is the brother-and-sisterhood of people who understand that in each other, whose common bond is the passion to play an instrument in a way that poses no limitations on their ability to make whatever music they conceive, and to do it as well as Chet did it.
I heard amazing players. I didn't hear one who pronounced himself satisfied with his playing. Bobby Gibson told of playing for two hours with Nokie Edwards on his porch. Both regretted that it wasn't recorded, because it was one of the few times both were entirely satisfied with their playing. That must have been a thing to hear.
The point is that along the way to such moments of transcendance, these players have developed musical sensibilities and technical facility that most of us only dream of. They make the purest kind of music imaginable, with all the social, emotional, and spiritual benefits that entails. That they consider themselves still imperfect simply reflects the example of Chet and his own humility, his sense of perpetual striving.
Chet inspired their aspiration. He provided encouragement, made discipline a joy, and became the core of community. He presented a quest which lasts a lifetime, and rewards of accomplishment which come as milestones along the way. The young kid he fired up in 1955 may look like a Cracker Barrell checker player in 2008 – and might have been no more than that without Chet. But a lifetime of lasting and persistent dedication to the music is transforming. These people play GUITAR, not checkers.
Along with the example of his talent, his kindness and generosity and humility and simple humanity, I think that's what Chet gives to people. It's why there's a worldwide community of fingerpickers in every imaginable style. It's for all those lives made richer and better – and the way they enrich ours – that we revere Chet.
(just teasing yetto)
