YouTube Gold: Chet Atkins Plays The Entertainer
One of the finest guitarists of all time plays a classic
For a long time, Scott Joplin was a forgotten musical genius.
Born in Texas in 1868, he showed an early aptitude for music and when he moved to Missouri in 1894, at some point he was exposed to Ragtime.
He mastered the form and began to compose pieces and even operas. Ragtime started to fade about the time he passed away, in 1917.
A revival began in the 1970’s after an album of his music was released, which was followed by the movie The Sting in 1973, which featured his composition The Entertainer.
Like Joplin, Chet Atkins was born poor. He grew up in East Tennessee and later said that “[w]e were so poor and everybody around us was so poor that it was the forties before anyone even knew there had been a depression.”
He was a brilliant guitarist though and in this clip, he plays The Entertainer solo. You really get a sense of the time the piece was composed - you can almost hear the horses clopping down the street and the early motors being tested and improved. It has the same quality as the early movies. It’s an early part of our world, forward looking even though it now seems quaint, but undeniably a break with the past.