Chet Atkins CGP was BOTD 20th June 1924 🎂. Known as "Mr Guitar", Atkins is truely the guitarist's guitarist, and remains one of my favourite.

SMWS 33.138. A Thigh-Slapping Dram. This is a 12yo Ardbeg distilled on 24th May 2007, matured in 2nd-fill ex-oloroso butt, bottled at 60.9%. This is one of the finest Ardbeg I have come across, and just bottle-killed ... really sad to see this one go. Sláinte 🥃🥃.

Chet's thumb👍 and two finger✌️ style of picking was heavily influenced by Merle Travis whom he heard playing live on Cincinnati station WLW. Atkins of course went on to influence whole generations of guitar players, no less than Mark Knopfler and perhaps the best of them all, Tommy Emmanuel CGP.

"As a guitarist, Chet was without parallel. He played the guitar the way Fred Astaire danced. His fingers glided across the strings and the frets of his instrument so smoothly, so apparently effortlessly, that it seemed easy until you tried to replicate his movements. His intricate finger-picking style, in which his thumb supplied a bass line while his fingers created endless variations of melody and harmony, has influenced nearly every guitarist who picked up the instrument for the past sixty years. The Chet Atkins’ style might have been easy listening, but it was challenging playing." - Alan Cackett.

As a guitar player, this description is spot on 💯