Photo: Simone Cecchetti
Tommy Emmanuel Releases New Live Video For ‘Mr. Guitar (Live)’ in honor of Chet Atkins Birthday.
In honor of what would have been Chet Atkins’ 100th birthday today (June 20), Grammy® Award winner Tommy Emmanuel has released a newly shot video of “Mr. Guitar (Live).” It’s a song that Tommy wrote in honor of the legendary and influential guitar pioneer.
Watch the video, filmed at Tommy’s home outside of Nashville, TN and directed by Joshua Britt & Neilson Hubbard for Neighborhoods Apart.
The original studio recording of “Mr. Guitar” appeared on Tommy Emmanuel’s 1997 collaborative album with Chet Atkins titled The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World.
Watch “Mr. Guitar (Live)”
A live version the song, “Mr. Guitar (Live),” recorded in St. Louis, is featured as a live bonus track on Tommy’s album, Endless Road: 20th Anniversary Edition, released May 28, 2024.
Tommy Emmanuel is an acoustic guitarist extraordinaire, composer, and global touring artist. He is also one of five people ever named a C.G.P. (Certified Guitar Player) by Chet Atkins, the innovator, songwriter, producer, record company executive, and visionary.
“Mentoring and encouraging people is something that Chet always did,” Tommy says. “I try to do this thing with Gareth (Pearson), and I try to do the same with all young people. I encourage them to do things that I learned from Chet. I hope that somewhere somehow, I showed somebody something because of him that changed their life and made their life better. Cause he sure did that for me.”
Regarded as a landmark album within Tommy’s body of work, Endless Road has now been newly remastered for digital outlets and is also available for the first time ever on vinyl.
Tommy released his acclaimed Accomplice Two and earned the “Lifetime Achievement” Award from The National GUITAR Museum.
Here are Tommy’s North American tour dates for 2024. The full international list of dates is HERE.
Tommy Emmanuel has achieved enough musical milestones to satisfy several lifetimes. At the age of six, the Grammy® Award winner was touring regional Australia with his family band. By 30, he was a rock n’ roll lead guitarist burning up stadiums in Europe. At 44, he became one of five people ever named a CPG (Certified Guitar Player) by his idol, music icon Chet Atkins. Today, he plays hundreds of sold-out shows every year from Nashville to Sydney to London. He’s piled up numerous accolades, including two Grammy Award nominations, two ARIA Awards from the Australian Recording Industry Association (the Aussie equivalent of the Recording Academy); repeated honors in the Guitar Player magazine reader’s poll including a cover story for their August 2017 issue; a cover feature for Vintage Guitar’s July 2020 issue; and was Music Radar’s reader’s poll #1 winner of the Ten Best Acoustic Guitarists in The World (December 2019).
A noted fingerstyle guitarist, Emmanuel frequently threads three different parts simultaneously into his material, operating as a one-man band who handles the melody, the supporting chords and the bass all at once. His talents, which translate in any language, carry him to the far corners of the globe, but Emmanuel never plays the same show twice, and he improvises big chunks of every date. That leaves him open to those technical imperfections, though they also provide some of the humanity to an other-worldly talent.
Tommy Emmanuel website
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