The Chetboard

One of my Chet favorites to play is "Hello My Baby" from the early 1950s .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJLdn4b7Hyg

This tune is from " Stringin' Along With Chet Atkins" . I consider this album one of Chet's all time best even though it was very early in his career. I have some fans in AZ that still love this old music and I try to keep it alive.

Tom Conner

I think that album was my first Chet Atkins album and "hello my baby" was one of the first arrangements I learned. Of course my guitar teacher spoon fed it to me. I never could have figured out Chet's basic style much less the chord positions for that tune.

Rich Irvine

Rich:
I learned some of the old Chet tunes by ear off the radio and later off records. I thought I knew a lot of what Chet recorded in these early 50s to 70s LPs. I played on stage a couple years at CAAS with a player named Larry Odham from Knoxville and the first year I went in cold turkey and knew about 90% of what Larry was playing. The second year I asked Larry for a list of tunes and I never heard of some of them, even on YouTube. When I got to CAAS I asked Larry about them and turns out he learned a bunch from tape recordings he had of live Opry performances through the 40s and 50s. Chet must have had a huge repertoire of stuff he never put on record.

Tom Conner

Do you remember any of the tunes from the list? (titles, I mean...ones not recorded)

Norm:
Unfortunately I don't remember them by title. I may still have the list back in OH but right now I'm in AZ. For example I don't remember ever seeing "Georgia Camp Meeting" on any album from the early years but I picked it up from a live video on YouTube a while back. The other tunes Larry knew were in that vein.
Tom