In 1973, Chet Atkins came through surgery for colon cancer badly shaken. Jerry Reed had an unusual way of helping. He did not write his friend something soft and comforting. He wrote him a guitar instrumental called “Mister Lucky,” and he made it as difficult as he could, so Chet would have to concentrate on every bar of it instead of on the fear.
Reed explained the idea himself, many years later, in front of a nightclub audience in California.
The year Chet Atkins thought he was going to die
On April 23, 1973, surgeons removed a malignant tumor from Chet Atkins’s colon. He was 48 years old. He was running RCA’s Nashville operation, he had won the CMA’s Instrumentalist of the Year award several times, and he had signed or produced many of the biggest names in country music.
None of that made him feel brave. He later admitted that on the way to the operating room, he kept thinking he was going to die. He called himself a coward for it, and he never tried to dress the memory up into something heroic.
The timing made it stranger. That same year, Atkins was voted into the Country Music Hall of Fame at 49, the youngest person ever chosen at the time. The public saw a man at the very top of his field. Privately, he had just learned how fragile all of it was.
Why Jerry Reed owed him
Jerry Reed grew up in Atlanta learning guitar by listening to records by Merle Travis and Chet Atkins. By the early 1960s he was a gifted but struggling picker and songwriter in Nashville.
His break came when he sent a song called “Scarecrow” to Atkins at RCA. Atkins liked it so much that he recorded it himself, and in 1964 he signed Reed to the label. Atkins went on to produce Reed’s records, including “Guitar Man” and “Amos Moses,” and the two made duet albums together. Their first, Me and Jerry, won a Grammy.
Atkins also believed Reed’s fingerpicking was something special. Reed had taken the thumb-and-finger style that Travis and Atkins built and pushed it further, using his whole right hand in a way few players could follow. Atkins even said Reed helped him work out the picking on one of his own biggest hits.
What made “Mister Lucky” so hard
“Mister Lucky” is not a pretty little get-well tune. The bass line keeps moving under the melody instead of settling into a simple pattern. The harmonies shift constantly. It opens with a relaxed swing feel, and then partway through it changes character and drops into a straighter, more demanding section that is much harder to hold together.
Fingerstyle guitarists who have tried to learn it say the swinging opening is manageable. The straight section is where many give up.
That difficulty was the whole point. A piece like this does not let a player drift. It asks for full attention from both hands, measure after measure, which was exactly what Reed wanted for his friend.
The album that kept it
The piece was released in 1974 on Chet Atkins Picks on Jerry Reed, an album made up entirely of Reed compositions. Both men appear on the cover, but Reed actually plays on only two of the ten tracks. “Mister Lucky” is one of them.
It also stands apart in length. Most of the songs on the album run around two and a half minutes. “Mister Lucky” runs four. On a record built as a tribute from Chet to Jerry, the longest and most complicated piece was the one Jerry had written as a gift for Chet, and they played it together.
The night Jerry Reed told the story
Nearly two decades later, in 1992, Reed played the Crazy Horse, the well-known country nightclub in Santa Ana, California. He opened the acoustic part of his set with a nylon-string guitar, and he told the audience why he had written the first piece he was about to play.
“I wanted to write him a song so complicated that it would take his mind off the cancer.”
Then he played “Mister Lucky.”
The moment carried an extra layer. By the early 1990s, most people knew Jerry Reed as an entertainer: the hit singles, the TV appearances, the Snowman in Smokey and the Bandit. The intricate fingerpicking that had first caught Chet’s ear had largely faded from his shows. It was Atkins who encouraged him to go back to it.
That same period brought the two of them back together on record. Their duet album Sneakin’ Around came out in late 1991, they performed together on several dates in 1992, and the album won the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance.
The rest of the story
Atkins lived 28 more years after that first surgery, but cancer never fully left him. Prostate cancer followed, then lung cancer, and in 1997 a brain tumor. Looking back late in life, he said the illness had taught him he was not as tough as he wished, and that he did not want to die.
“I want to keep on playing music.”
Reed kept playing that music too. In 2000 he released an album titled Forever Chet, and on his fingerpicking album Finger Dancing he recorded “Mister Lucky” all over again. Chet Atkins died at home in Nashville on June 30, 2001. Jerry Reed died in 2008.
The song Reed wrote to keep his friend’s hands busy outlived them both. Guitar players are still sitting down with it today, getting lost in that moving bass line, which is about as close as anyone can get to what Jerry Reed hoped it would do for Chet in 1973.
Did you ever hear Jerry Reed and Chet Atkins play together, on a record or in person?