Sam Atkins Company Aytch

Includes the albums Hum & Strum Along (1959), Mister Guitar (1959), After The Riot at Newport (1960), Teensville (1960), The Other Chet Atkins (1960), Chet Atkins Workshop (1960), Most Popular Guitar (1961) and Christmas with Chet Atkins (1961).

Chet Atkins' sleek, elegant guitar-playing almost single-handedly ushered in the so-called Nashville sound in the 1950s and 1960s, and in retrospect his perfect tone and easy grace on the guitar on his solo albums almost seem closer to smooth jazz than country. This set combines on a single disc two of his mid-'60s albums for RCA's Camden Records imprint, 1966's Music from Nashville, My Home Town and 1967's Chet Atkins, and the two outings fit together seamlessly into an impressive look at this amazing player…

If the cover of At Home evokes the 1950s, the music on In Hollywood is the 1950s: a warm, cozy, sophisticated album of mood music in the best sense. Yet this is not an album of film music (though a handful of film themes turn up). Rather, it is exactly what the title indicates: Chet Atkins recording an album in a Hollywood studio, as opposed to the familiar haunts of Nashville…

When Sam Cooke signed with RCA Records in 1960, he had already had several hits ("You Send Me," "What A Wonderful World," and "Only Sixteen" among them) on the small independent label Keen Records. He had paid attention to the business sides of things, too, and he signed with RCA because he was allowed to keep control of his song publishing…