Master guitarist Earl Klugh honors his friend and musical hero Chet Atkins (1924-2001) during a concert at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Along with sharing fond memories, Klugh invites a number of guitarists to join him.

Guests at this June 30, 2012, performance include Ben Hall, John Knowles, Bill Piburn, Mark Pritcher and Steve Wariner. The set list—a mix of instrumental originals, standards, and songs recorded by Atkins—includes solo renditions of “This Time” and “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”; Klugh’s collaboration with Hall and Piburn on “What a Day for a Daydream”; Klugh and Wariner’s duet on Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”; and “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” by the entire cast. Near the end of the program, Piburn and Pritcher, president of the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society, also make remarks.

Klugh opens the program recalling his mother’s love for country music, and how he discovered Atkins on Perry Como’s television variety show in the mid-1960s. Klugh, age thirteen and living in Detroit at the time, began studying Atkins’s playing on dozens of albums.

After they met in the late 1970s, Klugh and Atkins collaborated on recordings and TV appearances, and Klugh often visited Atkins in Nashville until his death in 2001. As a gesture of friendship, Atkins gave his first classical guitar to Klugh, who loaned the instrument to the Museum for its exhibition “Chet Atkins: Certified Guitar Player.”

The program concludes with an encore of Klugh’s “Angelina,” which appears on his self-titled debut album.

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