SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times

Richard Kiser stayed off the road for 20 years to be home for his three sons.

Kiser received a glass trophy for his induction into the Country Gospel Music Hall of Fame.

SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times

Country Gospel Music Hall of Fame inductee Richard Kiser performs at his home in Salem.

Growing up, Richard Kiser had two goals -- he wanted to play guitar like Chet Atkins, and he wanted to make a living as a gospel music performer.

Nearly a half-century after picking his first notes, he's realized both. His style, heavily influenced by the late fingerpicker Atkins, is a hit with audiences of all ages. Since about 1995, Kiser has made a living playing guitar at churches, schools, business functions and retreats.

Last month, Kiser, of Salem, was inducted into the Country Gospel Music Hall of Fame. He joined performers such as Loretta Lynn, Barbara Mandrell, Lulu Roman and Andy Griffith. Kiser is the 12th member of the hall.

"I was the first artist that's actually a performing Christian recording artist," he said. All the others are country artists who also perform gospel music.

It was an unexpected honor for Kiser, who doesn't really consider himself a country gospel artist, per se. His spiritual music draws from a lot of sources. Still, he was happy to receive the glass trophy, which stands in his music room, on a shelf filled with awards.

But Kiser said his biggest honor is not on that shelf.

"To me, the biggest honor is still that my wife and kids still respect what I do and they enjoy it, and that they're still my biggest fans," he said.

Self-taught picker

Kiser was 6 when he first heard Chet Atkins. He was 13 by the time he persuaded his father to get him a guitar. From there, he jumped right into teaching himself to play like Atkins.

"All of it the hard way, because when I started learning to play guitar, you didn't have a YouTube, and there was no such thing as video," said Kiser, 62. "Kids got it easy now."

In other words, Kiser was getting together a lush fingerpicking style with lots of moving chord forms under his own steam -- a very difficult task. Within about six years, he had the style down.

"I'm still learning," he said.

But he's clearly made an impression in the Atkins fan community.

Kiser met Atkins in 1992, and in the mid-1990s, he started attending the Chet Atkins Guitar Convention in Nashville, Tenn. For past 11 years, Kiser has been a regular performer at the event. Among the friends he has made through that convention and his other musical travels are the great guitarists Tommy Emmanuel and Doyle Dykes.

But Kiser wanted to do more than play like the late Atkins. He wanted to make a living playing Christian music.

At 18, he joined a Shawsville-based group, the Sunnyside Singers, supporting the multiple-harmony, Southern gospel group for about a year before he was drafted in 1965, during the Vietnam War. After serving at an Army base in Korea -- he said he bought a guitar there and kept up his chops -- he returned to the states and joined a group called the Melody Masters.

Kiser had been with the Melody Masters for six years when, in 1974, he decided it was time to stay home with his wife, Esther, and their three sons.

He would stay off the road for more than 20 years. He took a day job as a computer tech with Pitney-Bowes and moonlighted with studio work, weddings and other gigs. But by 1995, his sons were grown and the road was calling.

"I started getting more requests to come out and play," he said. "And it just kind of snowballed into a thing of touring just as an instrumentalist. And I was able to mold that into a viable ministry."

Momentum was slow at first. Churches didn't quite realize what a solo instrumentalist could do to hold a crowd. But word got out. The gigs kept coming. Within a few years, Kiser took early retirement.

Since 2001, he and Esther, his wife of 43 years, are on the road for what has become 125 to 150 show dates annually across the country.

"Now we're as busy as we can be," Kiser said.

Every day is a new adventure for the couple, Esther Kiser said. But their fun on the road sprang from a mutual respect that grew during all those years that Richard stayed around home. Those days would have been prime time for the young guitarist, but he never complained, she said.

"Even though he could've gone far ... with his music ... he was so very conscious first of wanting to be a father to these little boys," Esther Kiser said. "As they have grown to be such great men ... I just know that made a huge difference in their world.

"And I feel like that is the reason that he has been so amazingly successful, because he did what he thought he should do, and God honored his faithfulness."

Two of the Kisers' three sons play some music, though not professionally, Richard Kiser said. Three of their grandsons are also playing, he said.

Even after all these years, Esther Kiser said she just "stands back in awe" of his performances and interactions with audiences.

When they're in town, Kiser plays at their church, Parkway House of Prayer, in Roanoke. He'd like to get more work in the Roanoke Valley and Southwest Virginia.

"We're hoping over the next couple of years to get better known here in the valley and get more frequent concerts ... at least in this part of the state," he said.

Kiser has recorded seven albums, mostly tracked in his basement, and all with help from Tom Ohmsen at Flat 5 Press and Recording Co. in Salem.

"He's really a first-class guitar player," Ohmsen said. "He's very methodical and really plans out his projects."

Occasionally, Kiser will toss in a flashy lick, but he keeps it tasteful, Ohmsen said.

"What he tells me is, 'Well, if I did that all day long, it would just be a collection of flashy licks,' " he said. "So he knows his audience ... wants to hear the melody and wants to hear certain styles, and he's really learned what his market is -- probably one of the biggest success stories for an independent artist."

Audience-building

Kiser, raised in the Assemblies of God church, said that 95 percent of his work is at churches of all denominations.

The avid hunter also plays and speaks for sportsman's banquets and wild game banquets, as well as men's retreats and town festivals. For nonchurch shows, he breaks out popular secular numbers, such as "Ghost Riders in the Sky," "Last Date," "In the Mood" and "Malaguena" -- he even plays the occasional secular tune at churches, "just for the fun of it."

In any situation, he works with instrumental loops he has set up to provide some backing instrumentation while letting his fingers do the rest of the work on a collection of electric and acoustic guitars. Sometimes, he works with brilliant country music harmonica player Charlie McCoy.

Recently, though, he's moved on two completely different fronts at once. On one front, he's playing retirement homes and church senior groups, to people who know and appreciate the Atkins guitar style. On another, he's playing an increasing number of school shows.

At the school shows, he delivers a pro-abstinence, anti-drug message that includes talk about sexting and other digital-age issues. He breaks out a guitar called the Muffler. A luthier friend of his built the instrument with an actual 1968 Thunderbird muffler, attaching a neck, tremolo bar and pickups. He plugs in a stage fog device to get smoke rolling out of the pipes while he plays.

"It definitely is a hook," he said. "And it's a hook that the kids never forget."

That guitar is big on the drag racing circuit, too. National Hot Rod Association living legend "Big Daddy" Don Garlits autographed it.

The showmanship is there, and the big audiences are nice, but ultimately, Kiser said he is performing for an "audience of one."

"It's just me and my God," he said, "who I'm trying to communicate with through my hands."