JANUARY 17, 2019
Guitar whiz Tommy Emmanuel could play all day . . . and does
SIMONE CECCHETTI
Tommy Emmanuel is one of five musicians named a Certified Guitar Player by Chet Atkins.
By Lauren Daley GLOBE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY 17, 2019
When Tommy Emmanuel plays guitar, close your eyes and you could swear there are three of him.
A one-man-band, he is at once percussion, bass, and fiery picking — the kind that gets so fast, audiences are apt to cheer mid-song. Onstage, there is a light in his eyes. He grins. He might burst into laughter, as if he happens to like something his guitar just did.
You get the sense that when this concert ends, Emmanuel would keep playing long into the night if they let him. Tommy and his guitar, until the guitar gives up and splinters.
At least one of those guitars bears patches worn so thin, it looks like someone took a belt sander to it.
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In our recent phone interview with the native Australian, now based in Nashville, there was near glee in his voice when he talked about playing. Words like “joy,” “amazing,” “fate” were peppered throughout.
But honestly, nothing in the interview sums up his sentiments more plainly than this exchange:
Q. I’m guessing you always want to be a guitarist?
A. Oh yeah. There was never anything else. I was up at 5 a.m. today playing guitar.
Q. You seem like someone who needs to play every day to feel complete.
A. Well, it’s my destiny. There’s a feeling of: This is who I am and this is what I do.
Q. What would you do if you didn’t play guitar?
A. Sit around wishing I could.
The former Australian child guitar prodigy was championed in the United States by the late guitar great Chet Atkins, and is one of five musicians named a Certified Guitar Player — an elite club Atkins founded. Emmanuel’s touring now with another of those five, John Knowles. (The other CGPs are Steve Wariner, Paul Yandell, and the late Jerry Reed.)
Emmanuel and Knowles just released an album together, “Heart Songs.” They play City Winery in Boston Friday and Saturday (the second show is sold out).
“Tommy is the best stage partner I’ve ever worked with,” Knowles says in an e-mail. “He listens deeply and he works with you to give the audience a great experience.”
It’s cliche to call Emmanuel a guitarist’s guitarist, but it’s hard to find a better way to put it.
“A true genius,” Grammy winner Rodney Crowell says of Emmanuel in an e-mail. Crowell is one of a dozen or so musicians — along with Jason Isbell, Mark Knopfler, and Ricky Skaggs — featured on Emanuel’s 2018 album “Accomplice One.”
“I’ve sat with him on a tour bus at 8 a.m. and listened to a 20-song set covering the Easybeats, Doug Sahm, and George Gershwin,” Crowell says. “After breakfast, it’s a 10-song Merle Haggard medley with a bit of Django Reinhardt and the Ventures thrown in. The man’s musical vocabulary is as boundless as his playing.”
During the middle of Emmanuel’s jams, things start happening that feel like they shouldn’t. Dueling banjos, but from one guitar. A set might range from bluegrass barnburner to hot flamenco, classical to skiffle gypsy jazz.
“I would consider Tommy one of the top guitarists in the world,” says Berklee College of Music guitar professor Guy Van Duser, who has tapped Emmanuel to teach master classes at the Boston school. “You know instantly if you are hearing Tommy — his personality always communicates through his music. He has tireless energy on stage, can dazzle with blinding speed, and is a fountain of hot licks and playing ideas.”
Born “way out in the country,” in Muswellbrook, New South Wales, Australia in 1955, Emmanuel can’t remember life without guitar. His mother taught him, one of six kids, chords at age 4.
“I remember my mother showing me how to put my fingers on the strings, and what that shape meant. She told me I’d get sore fingers and to keep going,” Emmanuel, 63, says with a laugh.
The Emmanuel children “all wanted to play music. And it seemed that’s what we were destined to do,” he says. (Older brother Phil, an award-winning guitarist, died in May of an asthma attack at 65.) Four of them formed a family quartet, eventually called the Midget Safaris after the surf-rock band, when Tommy was 6.
“We entered talent contests, got ourselves on TV in Australia. Then we sold everything — sold our house, bought cars and trailers, and started traveling,” he says.
“I was really little. I could only play the first part of the show. At intermission, I’d get in the back seat of my dad’s car and slept. That was my home — the back seat of dad’s car,” he says with a laugh. The family would end up spending four years on the road. “By age 6, I was a seasoned pro — talking to the audience, moving around onstage, enjoying myself,” Emmanuel says. “I think when you’re little and get a response from people — when people light up when you do what you do — that feeds your excitement.”
Around that time, Emmanuel had a life-altering moment: He heard Atkins on the radio. “I was totally enthralled. I had an epiphany. I said to my father, ‘I don’t know what that is, but I know that’s what I have to do.’ ”
At 11, Emmanuel wrote to his hero. “A month later, I got a reply — a signed black-and- white photo, signed to me, and a nice encouraging letter,” he says.
When he was about 18, his friends recorded him and sent tapes to Atkins without Emmanuel’s knowledge.
“One day I get this letter out of the blue saying: ‘Please come to Nashville. Let’s hook up.’ I was stunned,” Emmanuel says. “Getting a letter from Chet Atkins, that’s a big deal for a kid. And it spoke volumes about him.”
In 1980, at age 25, he made “the pilgrimage” to his idol’s Nashville office.
“We became instant friends,” Emmanuel says. “He saw in me something he thought was worth investing in. He encouraged me, showed me stuff, helped me. I got on the Grand Ole Opry, because Chet said to the guy, ‘You’ve got to have him on the show.’ And the guy said, ‘How’s next Saturday?’ ”
Eventually, mentor and protege made an album together, 1997’s “The Day Finger Pickers Took Over The World,” which earned Emmanuel his first Grammy nod.
He’s since earned a string of accolades, including a 2011 induction into the Australian Roll of Renown, an honor given to Australian musicians who have made a significant contribution to country music. He and brother Phil played the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
While he’ll happily play guitar anywhere — in a tour bus at 8 a.m., say — playing for a crowd “makes people happy. That makes me happy. It takes people away from their existence for a while. Distracts them with something you can’t quite put your finger on. That’s a magical thing.”