Mr. Guitar

Chester Burton “Chet” Atkins, June 20, 1924 – June 30, 2001

Born on this Day in 1924.

Chet Atkins was an American guitarist known for helping to creat the Nashville sound of country music.

Atkins received 14 Grammy Awards and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He also received nine Country Music Association Instrumentalist of the Year awards. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. He has also been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

born in Luttrell, Tennessee, Atkins started playing the ukulele but when he was nine traded his brother an old pistol and some chores for a guitar.

Atkins didn’t classify his music as country, or pop but called it “American music.” He said “I just try and play things that give me chills, to express myself from the heart through my music.”

Atkins died of lung cancer in 2011. He was 77.



I want my crayons back

“Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Often attributed to Red Smith.

I’m a writer. I know that now.

I probably knew it when I was twelve or thirteen. In high school I had a creative writing teacher tell me “never stop writing.”

But I did. And, I regret that.

Hugh MacLeod, author of Ignore Everybody; and 39 Other Keys to Creativity and cartoonist at Gaping Void says:

“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back, please.'”

Now, forty years later, I want my crayons back. I finally know what I want to be when I grow up.

No, it’s not what I want to be. It’s what I am. It’s who I am.

I am a writer.

The struggle now is not that I don’t have things to say. I have plenty of things to say. But the struggle is to find a way to say them that also pays the bills and feeds the family.

So as I continue on this path I find that much of the writing I do is utilitarian. It’s not the great southern American novel that I want to write. That’s coming. In fact bits and pieces of it are already done.

But I’m just not yet to the point where I can be a full time author. Until then I craft words to sell things, to entice you to read things, to entice you to vote for certain candidates.

I do that because I am a writer. I may not be a good one. I may not be a successful one.

But I am one.

And that wee voice is saying “pass the magenta.”