Ten Favorite City Vs. Country (Country) Songs: Country Gentleman (#9)

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Having already posted a discussion of my next favorite "city" song in this friendly battle of "city vs. country," it's time to move to the country side of things. Here's the next song on my list of favorite songs with "country" in the title. #9: Country Gentleman - Chet Atkins Just how iconic is this song? Gretsch Guitars had a line of guitars endorsed and played by Chet Atkins. They were called "Country Gentleman" guitars. Atkins' 1975 autobiography was titled Country Gentleman. So this is a song, a guitar, and an autobiography! Ferociously humble and shy (the story is his future wife started talking to him at a radio station function in Cincinnati because she "took pity on him" sitting by himself), Atkins grew up a sickly child. He had asthma (okay, so I have one thing in common with Chet Atkins! It certainly isn't my guitar playing! ), and he took up playing guitar because going outside into the humid east Tennessee weather made his asthma flare up. (Nothing has changed that much: the area where Atkins was born [Luttrell, Tennessee, not too far from the Smoky Mountains] inevitably ranks in the top three worst places in the US for allergies.) His idol was Merle Travis, who was a hotshot thumb picking guitarist on Cincinnati's WLW radio station with a style so unique in the mainstream music world that, to this day, it's still known as "Travis-style" picking. Atkins listened, learned, and dang near perfected Travis-style playing. It scared the bleep out of musicians, too: the story is that Nashville-area guitarists didn't want Chet around, so they conspired with Grand Ole Opry management to keep him confined to the Opry. (On two occasions he auditioned with an act, and the Opry manager told the act to get rid of Chet.) In 1973 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, at the time the youngest living member inducted (49). He is also, to my knowledge, one of the only set of brothers-in-law inducted: while there are many brother acts in the Country Music Hall of Fame, the only two brothers-in-law inducted are Atkins and his brother-in-law, Jethro Burns of Homer & Jethro. And that brings up one of Jethro's classic jokes: when asked how they told their identical twin sister wives apart, Jethro replied, "We never try." Country Gentleman Written by Chet Atkins and Boudleaux Bryant Recorded by Chet Atkins Released as a single, 1953 Here's Chet -- with his brother-in-law on mandolin: