[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 100 (Wednesday, July 18, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7877-S7878]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         REMEMBERING THREE GREAT MUSICIANS, THREE GREAT FRIENDS

 Mr. MILLER. Mr. President, three good and uniquely talented 
men who spoke to the world through the universal language of music died 
recently.
  Chet Atkins, John Hartford, and Johnny Russell are gone. They are 
dead, but as long as their music is played they remain alive, and they 
will be for a long, long time.
  Chet Atkins was as responsible as any single person for turning 
Nashville, Tennessee, into ``Music City, USA'' and was the originator 
of what came to be called ``The Nashville Sound.'' From his position as 
vice president in charge of country music for RCA and because of the 
great respect other artists had for him, he was able to influence the 
direction the music went in and who the artists were who made it.
  A laconic, modest man, Chet Atkins played down his own importance and 
referred to himself simply as ``a picker.''
  John Hartford is best known as the songwriter of ``Gentle On My 
Mind,'' one of country music's most recorded songs and as the banjo 
picker in the Glenn Campbell and Smothers Brothers Shows. But he was 
much more than that. He was a versatile musician who recorded nearly 40 
albums of his own and appeared most recently on the soundtrack of ``O 
Brother, Where Art Thou?''
  Johnny Russell was a country music singer and songwriter, but it was 
one of his songs by The Beatles that was his most successful 
compositions. It was called ``Act Naturally'' and was on the flip side 
of the Beatles' single ``Yesterday.'' His biggest hit as a singer was 
``Red Necks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer.''
  Much more could be said, and has been said, about these three 
remarkable talents who died so closely together. The New York Times 
wrote lengthy obituaries of both Atkins and Hartford.
  I had the good fortune of knowing all three as personal friends. Chet 
once showed me the toilet stall in a school in Harris County, Georgia, 
where as a young picker using it, he got the idea

[[Page S7878]]

for an echo chamber. John Hartford and his talented son, Jamie, have 
stayed up late with me at the Georgia Governor's Mansion picking and 
singing. And Johnny Russell always said my wife, Shirley, made the best 
biscuits he had ever eaten. Coming from a 275-pound man with a 
tremendous appetite, she always considered that to be the supreme 
compliment.
  I will miss them. America will miss them. But their music still 
lives. Thank God, their music still lives.

                          ____________________