I remember the first guitar I ever saw up close. I must have been about ten or eleven years old. It was a little tenor guitar that belonged to my best friend’s sister but I thought it it had a nice sound and I was delighted to be allowed to play it. The tuning was just like a regular guitar except you didn’t have to worry about the low E and D so you could play one and two finger chords and the simple finger shapes were easy to pick up. In no time flat my friends had taught me how to play a popular song of the day (“Let’s Get Together” from a film called The Parent Trap with Haley Mills and Brian Keith). I remember the song and chord sequence to this day G to G7, etc.
I don’t know why I didn’t go back to my parents that very night and ask for a guitar. Maybe I did, I don’t remember. But my musical education ended up expressing itself through the clarinet and the piano for some reason. Maybe the guitar was too much of a rock and roll instrument for me at the time.
Once I got out on my own in my twenties I bought my first fretted instrument. It was a guitar of sorts, a Hoffner hollow body Beatle bass, (fortunately not left handed like Paul’s). I had so much fun noodling around with that thing in my otherwise depressing hovel in Charleston, South Carolina. I tried to learn jazz and I played a few credible backup runs for Carlos Santana running through my sound system which sounded OK as long as Carlos was playing really loud.
I never progressed very far on the bass so I sold it and went on to a more normal life. It was a life rich with music, just not rich with music that I could play. I went from country to classical to jazz to rock to folk and eventually to bluegrass and old time. (I’ve gravitated to the latter two since about 1990 but I still enjoy them all). And my fascination with fretted instruments has persisted.
Nearly forty years after my first up close experience with a guitar my fascination with the instrument was renewed. By now I had a beautiful four year old daughter and a good friend gave Juliet a little nylon stringed guitar. I wish I could remember hearing my daughter play that guitar but I don’t. She must have played it some because now she is a very good guitarist.
What I remember about that little guitar is how much i enjoyed playing it. I’d come home after a long day at work and noodle around on the guitar. It soothed my soul to pick out a few old standards and the effect was so rewarding that I resolved to finally master a fretted instrument. In retrospect, I am surprised that I didn’t choose the guitar. My experience as an eleven year old and the joy of learning Wreck of the Old 97 on a plywood guitar built for a four year old should have swayed me but for some reason it didn’t. As a novice to bluegrass picking I didn’t realize that, although lots of people play guitar, most of those people don’t play bluegrass and guitar players who can flat pick aren’t as common as they should be.
I chose the mandolin. I practiced like crazy and when I showed up for my first CBA bluegrass jam there were more mandolins than any other instrument. It was only than that I realized that that funny little cross between a guitar and a fiddle was a signature instrument of the genre, thanks to its founder Bill Monroe. I was stuck and although I had way too much competition, my would-be peers were welcoming and taught me everything that I could absorb.
Little by little, I became more comfortable on the jam scene although often outnumbered by better mandolin players. After a while I began to notice that some of these mandolinists were also good guitarists and if guitar was needed they switched off. I envied that skill and started switching off on the upright bass a little even though it wasn’t quite the same as my old lay down electric bass.
During the same time my daughter Juliet continued to go to music camp and Grass Valley with me every year. She progressed through a series of guitars much better than her original plywood child’s guitar and she became a pretty good picker. She formed a high school folk rock band with the grand-daughter of a then new friend of mine, Ernie Hunt. I visited Ernie at his home in Cloverdale after being introduced at one of the Golden Old Time campouts. I had heard about his guitar collection already but I was still awed by his collection of vintage Martins and luthier shop of partially finished guitars. So when Juliet and Ernie’s grand-daughter competed in the finals of the band competition, Ernie let Juliet play one of his prized Martins.
She and the band sounded great and we decided that Juliet needed a really good guitar. We went to a music store and played about fifty guitars over the course of a couple of hours. Juliet was very systematic in her search. One guitar judged the best so far would sit on a stand while she played each new candidate. If she found something better, she would replace the guitar on the stand with the new candidate and audition a new guitar. I was there with check book in hand through the whole process and I was impressed by how wisely she chose. Sometimes she asked my opinion but mostly she went by the sound and the feel of the guitar, In the end it came down to a couple of great guitars. She made her choice and I was impressed by the fact that two guitars of the same make and model might not sound the same.
Juliet’s new guitar sounded so good that I began noodling around on the guitar again. That sweet sound of her Gibson was so pleasing that I resolved to buy my own guitar. (By this time my daughter had moved away to college and my opportunities to play such a nice guitar were few). So I went back to the same music store and used the same approach: hear before you buy.
After about an hour at the store I selected a nice 2012 Martin D35 and have been playing it ever since. When I play at home now I play my guitar much more than the more familiar mandolin. It’s the new kid on the block for one thing and for another I like to sing and a guitar makes a more suitable singing accompaniment.
I love just looking at the wood on my new guitar. The triangular pattern of the three wood sections forming the back was a surprise to me. Ernie Hunt had schooled me on the beauty of a symmetric guitar back where the halves are flipped like an open page. I played guitars with that back at the store including the classic D18, but the ones I played didn’t sound as good to me on that day. I learned later that the perhaps less aesthetic triangular back of the D35 was inspired by a need to make use of odd pieces of usable Brazilian rosewood which was becoming a thing of the past. It is even more a thing of the past now. My guitar back is Indian rosewood. But the design with its aligned braces sounded good so they stuck with it and I’m glad they did because now I have a nice sounding guitar.
CF Martin was a cabinet maker and he made great guitars in Germany but he had problems negotiating the complexities of the instrument makers guilds in his home country so he moved his shop to the land of the free. He set up shop in Nazareth, Pennsylvania and the rest is history. Long live the guitar!
