With the family living in two station wagons, much of Emmanuel's childhood was spent touring Australia, playing rhythm guitar, and rarely going to school.

After their father died in 1966, Australian Country Music star Buddy Williams approached the family and asked permission to take the Emmanuel brothers on the road with his touring show travelling around Australia.

[5] In his teen years, Tommy Emmanuel moved to Sydney, and was noticed nationally when he won a string of talent contests.

[4][6] By the late 1970s, he was playing drums with his brother Phil in the group Goldrush as well as doing session work on numerous albums and jingles.

He gained further prominence in the late 1970s as the lead guitarist in the Southern Star Band, the backing group for vocalist Doug Parkinson.

In 1994, Australian music veteran John Farnham invited him to play the guitar next to Stuart Fraser from Noiseworks for the Concert for Rwanda.

Emmanuel had previously been a member of Farnham's band during the early 1980s and featured on the album Uncovered and rejoined after the 1994 concert.

[13] Emmanuel had said that even at a young age he was fascinated by Chet Atkins's musical style (sometimes referred to as Travis picking) of playing bass lines, chords, melodies, and harmonies simultaneously using the thumb and fingers of the right hand, achieving a dynamic range of sound from the instrument.

[14] He has played Maton guitars for most of his career and is somewhat of an ambassador for the company due to his long-standing association with the brand.

[15] Emmanuel is known for the battered and worn-down appearances of his guitars; a result of his dynamic, energetic playing and percussive techniques.

One of his signature performances, for example, involves striking the whole body of the guitar in various places with his hands or a drummer's snare-drum brush to emulate the sound of a percussion kit.

The guitar neck slightly bends away from the body and consequently affects the pitch of the strings to achieve the desired sound.

[citation needed] As a young man in Australia, Emmanuel wrote to his hero Chet Atkins in Nashville, Tennessee.

[16] In 1997, Emmanuel and Atkins recorded as a duo, releasing the album The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World.

Tommy performed at the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society (CAAS) in July each year in Nashville.