Album Review

Richard S. Ginell [allmusic.comm]

This listener participation album is more pertinent as a rival label's response to Mitch Miller's wildly popular Sing Along With Mitch series than as a significant addition to Chet Atkins' catalog. With a Nashville chorus singing a series of country and public domain popular songs straight and square, Atkins backs the voices with standard countrified fingerpicking, filling the spaces with tasteful obbligatos. An innocuous period piece through and through, notable only for some witty and elegant Atkins fills that somehow get by the concept. The original edition was an elaborate fold-out, do-it-yourself singing and playing kit; by 1961, a slimmed-down ordinary album cover would have to suffice.