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July 4, 2001 Guitars Gently Weep as Nashville Pays Tribute to Chet Atkins By DAVID FIRESTONE ASHVILLE, July 3 — Chet Atkins was as lean and spare and intense as Nashville is boisterous, a reticent musical craftsman who shaped and defined a city of showmen. At his funeral today, a worshipful country music industry tried to define its debt to him, finally giving up on superlatives and expressing itself as he did in the gentle picking of a Gretsch electric guitar.

As his friends Marty Stuart and Vince Gill played some of Mr. Atkins's hits, much of country music's royalty sat motionless on the hard wooden pews of the Ryman Auditorium, the old gospel tabernacle where Mr. Atkins played so often with the Grand Ole Opry. There was a strong sense among them that Mr. Atkins, who died of cancer on Saturday at 77, was the best musician of their music's founding generation, and took with him something elemental that is now lost in the marketplace.

"We will never see the like of his talent in one man," said a barely composed Eddy Arnold, the country singer whose hits in the 1950's and 60's were produced by Mr. Atkins. "When you talked about who was the greatest guitar player, Chet's name was never mentioned, because you just took him and put him up there, and then you argued about the rest of them."

But even beyond his six-string virtuosity, Mr. Atkins presided over the city for decades as its most prominent recording executive, a principal creator of the smooth and palatable "Nashville Sound" that took the music from its bluegrass origins to worldwide commercial success and erected a pillar of the state's economy. If the strings and controlled arrangements he and other producers added to the music stole some of its spontaneity and edge over the years, Mr. Atkins always said he did what was necessary to keep from being drowned out by rock 'n' roll.

Some results of his rescue efforts were evident in the long caravan of limousines that pulled up to the side door of the Ryman this morning and discharged celebrities that he first signed to recording contracts, or produced, or coached through ramshackle lives to stardom.

"He changed my life," said Charley Pride, the industry's only black superstar, discovered by Mr. Atkins. "Everything that ever happened to me started with him."

Dolly Parton, whom he signed to RCA, was not there, but Ray Stevens was, and Steve Wariner and T. G. Sheppard.

But it was the older stars, Mr. Atkins's own fragile generation, who showed up in the greatest numbers, struggling through infirmities to pay their tributes. Kitty Wells and her husband, Johnny Wright, walked slowly into the hall, Mr. Wright using a cane. Jumpin' Bill Carlisle, 92, whose Knoxville radio show gave Mr. Atkins early exposure in the 1940's, arrived in a wheelchair, a difficult sight for those who remembered him bounding across the stage of the Ryman during two of the three decades it housed the Opry. Waylon Jennings, country music's legendary rowdy, squirmed into his wheelchair from the back of the day's longest stretch limousine.

"He was a genius," said Mr. Jennings, whom Mr. Atkins signed and produced. "We used to argue and we'd get madder than hell. Then we'd go inside and make some great records."

Mr. Atkins's orange Gretsch guitar sat on the front of the stage in a spotlight during the service, next to one of his signature white hats. His friend Paul Yandell played a similar guitar on "Mr. Sandman," an instrumental hit for Mr. Atkins in 1955, and Connie Smith sang the gospel hymn "Farther Along," backed by an instrumental group that included Mr. Stuart on mandolin.

Later, perhaps in a tribute to Mr. Atkins's sweetened production style, Mr. Stuart and several other musicians played the old Skeeter Davis song "The End of the World," accompanied by a string quartet.

Garrison Keillor, who became a friend of Mr. Atkins's after many years of sharing the stage on Mr. Keillor's public radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," gave a eulogy laced with quotations from their personal correspondence, revealing a joking side to the guitarist not always on display in the studio.

"I had a screamer in the audience," Mr. Atkins wrote Mr. Keillor a few years ago. "I saw her later and she wasn't all that bad, about 35. A fellow could run some weight off her and maybe fall in love."

Mr. Keillor told some of the Atkins stories that have entered into local lore: How Mr. Atkins grew up poor and asthmatic in eastern Tennessee, replacing a broken string on his Sears Silvertone guitar with a wire from the screen door; how he developed his trademark picking style listening to Merle Travis on a crystal radio set; how he enchanted listeners at his first Opry performance in 1946 with an acoustic version of "Maggie," prompting Minnie Pearl to kiss him and say: "You're a wonderful musician. You're just what we've been needing around here."

Mr. Keillor reminded his audience of about 1,800 that Mr. Atkins knew and played with Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, and said Dolly Parton recently kept him laughing for hours as she flirted outrageously with him on his deathbed.

And he called Mr. Atkins the "guitar player of the 20th century," perhaps the greatest influence on other guitar players any musician has had.

"You might be shy and homely and puny and from the sticks and feel looked down upon," Mr. Keillor said, "but if you could play the guitar like that, you would be aristocracy and you would never have to point it out. Anybody with sense would know, and the others don't matter that much anyway."

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