[4] Also that year, he responded to a revival meeting altar call at the Baptist church that the Atwoods attended, becoming a born-again Christian, shortly before the family moved to California.

[4] At age 14, Atwood started playing the piano at a church in Pasadena and became interested in studying the music of his favorite composer, J. S. Bach.

[5] As a 17-year-old in 1929, he began playing the piano regularly for Paul Rader when the Chicago evangelist started a Tabernacle in Los Angeles.

[5] Atwood joined evangelist Charles E. Fuller's popular Old Fashioned Revival Hour nationwide radio broadcast in 1937, accompanying the choir and paid quartet on the piano.

[1] By the end of that year, the weekly program with Atwood at the piano was heard by a nationwide audience of 10 million listeners on 88 stations.

[1] In its heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s, the program was carried on hundreds of stations across the United States on the Mutual Broadcasting System and, later, the ABC Radio Network, and the audience had grown to an estimated 20 million listeners.

[5][12] Atwood wrote of the broadcast's theme song, "Heavenly Sunshine", "A thrill reaches to my toes each time I play [it]", and the familiar piece was his most-requested number during concerts.

[1][14] Atwood's signature style of continuous left-hand triplet-note octave doublings and right-hand arpeggios captivated audiences and was widely copied by many other evangelical pianists of the period.

[3] Among his audience favorites were "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing", "In the Garden", "When They Ring the Golden Bells", "Now I Belong to Jesus", and "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross".

Atwood, an avid sports fan, wrote in his autobiography, The Rudy Atwood Story, of their excitement when they witnessed Willie Stargell hit the first out-of-the-park home run at Dodger Stadium, a 507-foot (155 m) blast off the Dodgers' Alan Foster on August 5, 1969, that completely cleared the right-field pavilion and struck a bus parked outside the stadium.