Acoustic Guitar
Acoustic Guitar
My First Guitar Encore
We launched the Acoustic Guitar Podcast two years ago and the show has grown a lot in that time, thanks to listeners like you! This re-release of our first-ever episode includes Part Two which previously had only been available to our Patreon supporters.
In this episode, we share stories of first guitars. Tune in for renowned musicians Eric Bibb, Bruce Cockburn, Courtney Hartman, Richard Thompson, Badi Assad, Sharon Isbin, and Tommy Emmanuel; heartwarming, inspiring, and surprising tales from the community; plus previously unheard recordings of Doc Watson and Michael Hedges; and Dick Boak demonstrates the first instrument he ever built, long before his storied career with C.F. Martin & Co began.
Additional resources:
- Learn more about the artists who shared their stories in this episode:
- If you want to keep your first (or second, third, or 30th!) guitar in top playing condition, check out the Acoustic Guitar Owner’s Manual and Acoustic Guitar Care & Maintenance guides.
- Join our Patreon community to access bonus podcast episodes, exclusive live workshops, and more.
The Acoustic Guitar Podcast theme music is composed by Adam Perlmutter and performed for this episode by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers.
This episode is hosted by Nick Grizzle and Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, produced by Tanya Gonzalez, and directed and edited by Joey Lusterman. Executive producers are Lyzy Lusterman and Stephanie Campos Dal Broi.
The Acoustic Guitar Podcast is produced by the team at Acoustic Guitar magazine, including:
- Publisher: Lyzy Lusterman
- Editorial Director: Adam Perlmutter
- Managing Editor: Kevin Owens
- Creative Director: Joey Lusterman
- Digital Content Director: Stephanie Campos Dal Broi
- Digital Content Manager: Nick Grizzle
- Marketing Services Manager: Tanya Gonzalez
Special thanks to our listeners who support the show on Patreon.
Welcome to the Acoustic Guitar Podcast. I'm Nick Grizzle. We started this podcast two years ago and the show has grown a lot in that time, thanks to listeners like you. We're marking this milestone by sharing our first ever episode again. If you started listening to the Acoustic Guitar Podcast recently, you may not have gone back far enough in our catalog to have heard this one yet, but if you've been with us since the beginning, there's still something new for you here. Heard this one yet, but if you've been with us since the beginning, there's still something new for you here. This is my first guitar in its entirety part one as published in 2022, plus part two, which up until now, has only been available to our Patreon supporters. We hope you enjoy this episode and we hope you'll consider joining us on Patreon to access 20 bonus podcast episodes, plus exclusive lessons, live workshops and much more. You'll find it all at patreoncom slash acoustic guitar plus. Welcome to the first episode of the Acoustic Guitar Podcast.
Speaker 3:We are so excited to explore the world of acoustic guitars with you.
Speaker 1:I'm Nick Grizzle and I'm Jeffrey Pepper Rogers. And in this first episode we're going to be sharing stories of your first guitars.
Speaker 3:Everyone starts their journey differently, but we all shared a desire to get our hands on a guitar and start figuring out how to make music with it.
Speaker 1:So we reached out to some of our favorite guitarists, as well as readers of Acoustic Guitar Magazine and AcousticGuitarcom, to ask them to share their stories with us.
Speaker 3:This first one comes from Eric Bibb, great roots and blues guitarist and singer. Hi folks, this is Eric Bibb.
Speaker 4:The first guitar that I remember playing, that I actually got my little fingers around, was my dad's parlor-sized Galeano guitar. Galeano guitars were made probably by the Oscar Schmidt factory in New Jersey. We lived in New York, okay, a parlor-sized Oscar Schmidt factory in New Jersey. We lived in New York. Okay, a parlor-sized, beautiful Galeano, you know parlor-sized acoustic guitar. Okay, that was not my instrument.
Speaker 4:When I was about seven, let's say three years later, my parents bought me my first guitar. It was a cheap plywood guitar. The action was too high for my tender fingers and I really struggled with it. I had a teacher I think his name was Vic, who taught me that tune Yellow Bird. The Mills Brothers have a great version. Anyway, that really wasn't my thing. I wanted to actually accompany myself singing like Odetta, like Pete Seeger, like Josh White, you know, like those folks. Okay. So the next thing that happened was, by the way, I don't have that Galeano guitar and I don't have that cheapo plywood guitar.
Speaker 4:My next big guitar moment was Myron Weiss, a great guitar teacher down in Grange Village, who I studied classical guitar with. So we learned stuff by Soar and you know that kind of stuff, carcassi, great stuff. Anyway, I do remember borrowing from my dad's accompanist, stuart Scharf, a great guitarist a nylon string Gibson. That really became my favorite go-to guitar for a while. And then my friend Tim Ut lent me his Guild Guild 12 string and that was like the bomb. Gotta go, folks, but love it, keep playing.
Speaker 3:Ciao, great story I had a chance to open for Eric Bibb, once a fantastic performer, and from there we are going to go to Bruce Coburn, who I had the pleasure of interviewing numerous times over the years and I believe, wrote about in the very first issue of Acoustic Guitar in 1990, right up through a recent lesson interview that we did. That is included in this brand new book called Play Guitar Like the Great Singer Songwriters.
Speaker 5:My first guitar was one I found in my grandmother's attic closet. We happened to be staying there when I was 14 years old, waiting for the house my father was having built to be finished, and so I had this room up in the attic and I went rooting through the closet one day and I had this room up in the attic.
Speaker 5:And I went rooting through the closet one day and I found this beat-up cardboard guitar case and inside was an equally beat-up guitar, small, dark, scratched up thing and it had a raised nut on it for playing Hawaiian style, which I took off and I could then at least make the strings hit the fingerboard, but I had no idea what to do with it. I'd taken lessons on trumpet and clarinet before that, but knew nothing about guitar. But I started pounding away on it, trying to play rock and roll riffs, and I painted gold stars on the top of it and posed in front of the mirror with it, you know. And my parents got nervous and said OK, we can give you, we'll support you, we'll get you guitar lessons. You have to promise to take the lessons and learn to play properly, quote-unquote. And you have to also promise not to grow sideburns and get a leather jacket.
Speaker 5:This is 1959, and everyone was worried about the association between rock and roll and teen gangs and stuff like that, so they didn't want me going in that direction. The first lesson I took, the teacher said you can't learn on that guitar, it's just it's too. It's not good. So I got a K arch top and I had that for quite a long time. I took lessons on that and kind of wish I still had it actually the first tune I learned to play for myself off the radio. I was, you know, the guitar. The teacher was teaching me things to play, but I was very proud of myself for being able to figure out Walk, don't Run off the radio.
Speaker 3:So we have one more artist story to share here. This one's from Courtney Hartman, who's a great young flat picker and indie folk songwriter, and here is her story.
Speaker 7:This is Courtney Hartman and my first guitar was so adorable. I was about 10 or 11 and my parents made it a point to just have a lot of instruments around the house. I was taking violin lessons but guitar was like this kind of free reign instrument. And so there was a little Montana guitar that my parents bought in downtown Loveland at a music store and it was kind of golden, red and had nylon strings and was a perfect little size and the amazing thing is that that guitar all these years later still plays in tune and it sounds amazing and it was so easy to play. I remember just loving how easy it was for my fingers to press down the strings and have very fond memories of that guitar.
Speaker 1:And we actually had a first guitar feature story in the first issue of Acoustic Guitar Magazine. Jeff, you were the founding editor of Acoustic Guitar, so you actually worked on that feature.
Speaker 3:I did, and that was one of the things we did to kick off the magazine, and so it's great to come back and kick off the podcast with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean we'll get more on that later. Tell us a little bit about yourself. How long were you with the magazine and what are you doing nowadays?
Speaker 3:yeah, thanks. So, um, I was the founding editor when it was a tiny little company putting out acoustic guitar and strings magazine. I was the editor for the first 10 years and then switched over to uh to be a contributing editor, and I'm called editor at large these days and still doing lots of writing for the magazine. But I'm a guitar player, songwriter lifelong since I was a teenager.
Speaker 1:I'm a drummer but I do have a guitar. It's a Washburn from about 99, 2000, I think I remember I wanted it because I saw somebody playing this acoustic guitar plugged into an amp with distortion and I thought that was the coolest sound. Now I hear that I'm like that is not the coolest sound, but I wouldn't shut up about it. So my dad, for Christmas, months later, got me this acoustic electric Washburn. That's my first guitar story, getting inspired with a sound that I would never do now, but still having the guitar around to play as a constant musical companion.
Speaker 3:I think you ought to get that thing, plug it in and crank up the distortion and try it again.
Speaker 1:What about you? What was your first guitar?
Speaker 3:I had a Sears guitar that my parents gave me when I was 12. That kind of got me started. My older brother, three years older, had started when he was around the same age, and so that was actually one of the greatest things about learning is that we just started doing music together by the time I was 14 or 15, we were performing and everything. But the Sears guitar didn't last too long. I got a Yamaha that I sort of consider my Yamaha Dreadnought, that I consider sort of my real first guitar, consider my Yamaha Dreadnought, that I consider sort of my real first guitar. But I just got to share the sad thing that happened to my very first the Sears guitar, which is I was in high school and I got this Yamaha and so I was going to figure it.
Speaker 3:I would just give the Sears guitar to somebody else who would want it. And a friend of mine said oh yeah, I would love to have that. Can I have it? And so I gave him the guitar, figuring he really wants to learn guitar. I'm doing this nice thing for my friend. And about 10 minutes later he came back with just the neck of it and he had just gone and smashed my guitar. No, he was into the who or something. Maybe he'd just seen.
Speaker 3:Animal House? Yeah, I don't know. So that was a little sad, I got to say it was not really what I was thinking was going to be the fate of my first guitar, but anyway it got me going.
Speaker 1:With our first guitar stories out of the way, let's dive into our first call-in. Here is Richard Thompson. Jeff, what do you know about Richard Thompson?
Speaker 3:Well, he's the incredible triple threat as an amazing songwriter and a guitarist and performer and everything. He kind of blows the fuses of guitarists wherever he goes. He's so skilled, so good and so witty and all that. So I've loved interviewing him a couple times over the years and he's a very thoughtful guy. So I'm excited to hear what he had to say about his first guitar.
Speaker 6:Well, I'll give you the whole story. So my father was in the police police and he was working in the West End of London where all the guitar shops were, and one of his old army buddies from World War II ran a guitar shop and they were throwing out this cheap Spanish guitar because the cider split open. And my father said well, you know, I trained as a joiner, you know as a house carpenter. You know I'll take it and I'll fix it up, because you know he used to play the guitar before the war and he was a big Django Reinhardt fan and everything. So he hadn't had a guitar for years. So he brings it home and he glues it up and by that time I'm a big guitar fan.
Speaker 6:You know, everybody in rock and roll was posing, if not playing a guitar, and my sister also had designs on it as well. My father, of course, had designs on it, but I kind of grabbed it and possessed it and it was really, you know, it was a cheap nylon-strung guitar. It probably cost at retail, you know, at at the time about £5, £10. And it did me for a few months. But then I started taking classical guitar lessons and my teacher said you know this is really holding you back. You need to convince your parents to get you something better. So after about six months I ditched it and I got a better nylon-striped guitar and that did me for a couple of years and then I got an electric guitar and then rock and roll possessed me and the rest is history.
Speaker 6:So 1960, the British band called the Shadows, a very famous instrumental band, had a number one hit with Apache. So we were all trying to play Apache and I got the chords down for Apache that I could play the melody down. My sister was a big Buddy Holly fan, so trying to play Piggy Sue was another big step and a very useful step, because it's basically A, d, a, e. If you could get fluent on those three chords, you're making big progress. So that was all good stuff for me.
Speaker 3:I love those songs that help people get started, some things with just a few notes or a couple of chords and you're off to the races.
Speaker 1:Well, we also had some readers write in, not just call in, so we're going to read a few throughout this episode, and apologies if we mispronounce anybody's names. This one is from Lee Spear, who shares her story, and this kind of reminds me of the power of music. She says my first guitar belonged to one of my older brothers. He had been in a motorcycle accident and wasn't wearing a helmet Fortunately no broken bones but he was pretty beat up during the skid and had almost lost one of his ears. My parents were telling us his fight to keep his ear wasn't going well and I was just 16 years old at the time. So his guitar was at our house and I decided I would try to learn to play something to cheer him up, since he couldn't have it in his hospital room. I learned the sound of silence from Simon and Garfunkel. I wanted it to sound like their version, so I plucked the strings and didn't strum.
Speaker 1:He was able to come home a week later, so I played it for him and he was quiet at the end. Was that okay? I asked how long have you been playing? He asked Just this past week. I'm sorry if it wasn't very good. He laughed. It was better than I ever was. You keep the guitar. You can never sell it. Give it back to me if you don't want to play it anymore. Okay, that was the beginning of my life, with a beautiful companion. To manage the ups and downs that we're all dealt, he gave me his G10 Goya, probably made in the 50s. I'm now 63 and I still have the guitar. It has had a little work done on it and I play it fairly often. What a beautiful sound. It always cheers my soul when I play it, heck, even when I think about it.
Speaker 1:What a sweet story, gosh. How do you not smile after hearing something like that? Right, we now have a clip from Bajie Asad, a great classical guitarist. Does so many amazing innovative things with guitar. I've been fortunate to see her live and wow, what a fantastic musician.
Speaker 9:What about my first guitar? So I am the sister of Sajan Udayi Assad. So when I was born, these two unbelievable musicians were already playing the guitar, so it always had a guitar around the house. But if you asked me as a child, what do you want to be when you grow up, I would always answer I want to be a dancer, I want to be different, okay.
Speaker 9:But when I was 14 years old, my father invited me to play chorinho with him, something that he had done with my brothers many years before. And I said yes because I had this dream to become closer to daddy, and it was through music. But I had no guitar. So, odair, let me use one of his guitars. It was a Paul Fisher from England then. It had a beautiful sound, even if back then I didn't know what a beautiful sound would be. But, believe it or not, it has been the guitar I recorded all my albums. So this guitar is my lucky one, is still here with me and I'm telling you the sound of it is unbelievable and very easy to play, and interesting to know also that my brothers say that since this guitar became mine, the sound has changed. Nowadays it is more feminine. We can only wonder why, but I think it's nature. So this is it my impressions about my first guitar.
Speaker 3:Hearing her voice there just brought back a great memory of her coming to the acoustic guitar office around probably mid-90s and playing for us in our conference room and leaving us all completely speechless.
Speaker 1:Some people got their guitar later in life, but, as we know, as we all know, you are never too old to start learning guitar, as Bob Barry says in this next clip.
Speaker 11:Rather than being a little kid, a young kid, I'm a senior. I was 70 years old, over 70, when I first ran across my guitar and it happened to be my wife's brother who had passed away, and we had everything in storage and we opened it up one day to go through it and, lo and behold, there was a classical guitar there and I thought you know, it's interesting. And I thought, well, I think I'll mess around a little bit. And so I went and I had it restrung, had it taken care of, and I decided I was going to take lessons. And I started taking lessons and got a little better. I'm still not very good, but it was all because of this guitar in storage that was in mint condition. It just hadn't been opened. We hadn't opened the case. It was there and we didn't even know what was inside. And there it was. So that's my story and that's how I got started.
Speaker 3:I love hearing that story. Somebody just asked me the other day I always wanted to play, but I feel like I'm too old. You know is it? Am I too old to start playing? And I think I'll point that person to Bob's message here. Good reminder that you can always start.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it just takes that one spark of inspiration and who knows when it's going to come. Never too late to start playing any instrument, especially guitar. In this section we're going to talk a little bit about your experience putting together that first issue of Acoustic Guitar Magazine, jeff. As I recall seeing thumbing through the archives, sharon Isbin was on the cover.
Speaker 3:Thumbing through the archives, sharon Isbin was on the cover. That's right. Yeah, sharon was, and she was a columnist in the early years of the magazine. It was great to work with her, and, yeah, so this was middle of 1990 when the first issue came out and we had a whole bunch of guitarists an amazing number of guitarists who signed up to get our premiere issue for this magazine. We wanted to start, and one of the stories that I put together for that issue was a feature called my First Guitar, where I interviewed a bunch of artists about their stories, like we're doing here, and Sharon shared her story there. But I understand you've got a new clip of her talking about her first guitar here. Right, go to that next.
Speaker 13:I'm Sharon Isbin and this is the story of my first guitar. I was nine years old when our family moved to Italy. For a year we lived in the town of Varese, which was near Milano. My brother, who is seven years older than I, told my parents that he wanted guitar lessons. So they researched this. And then they got very excited when they learned that a guitar teacher and performer named Aldo Minella was commuting twice a week from Milano to Varese and he had studied with Segovia and was concertizing throughout Italy. So they brought my brother in for the interview. But the moment he saw Aldo's long fingernails on his right hand and learned that this was classical guitar, he said no way, my fantasy is to be the next Elvis Presley, but my parents would determine that someone in the family had to study with this guy. This was just too great an opportunity to let go, so, out of family duty, I volunteered and thus became a guitarist by default.
Speaker 13:The next step was to get an instrument, so, being a little kid, it had to be made for me. Aldo recommended that we go to visit the guitar maker, mario Pabé, who lived off in the countryside. I'll never forget climbing a rickety old wooden staircase surrounded by fluffy white chickens squawking away in his farm. We get to the top of the stairs and there is Mario. He measured my hands, my arms and he said to my parents come back in a couple of months. We did, and he presented me with this beautiful instrument. I'll never forget being struck by the smell of the wood, that I could cradle it. I could feel the vibrations against my body and that this was something really personal, made just for me. I couldn't wait to begin my guitar lessons. I still have this instrument and every once in a while I take it out and I remember what a beautiful experience it was that my life in music began in Italy.
Speaker 1:Now that that is like a fairy tale story.
Speaker 3:So in putting together this episode I also dug into some dusty boxes to find tapes of some of the other interviews I did Again, we're talking 1990, so more than 30 years ago and I wanted to share a couple of clips that were also from those interviews with some musicians who are no longer with us. So this first one comes from Doc Watson, and so great to hear his voice, and I will just apologize for the sound quality here, but these were recorded on the phone with a microcassette recorder with a lot of buzz and noise, and we've done our best to kind of clean them up to present them to you here. But, as I said, it's great to hear the unmistakable voice of Doc.
Speaker 14:When I was about 13, one of my brothers borrowed a guitar and brought it home. It was a. Let me see what kind was that thing? A harmony guitar arch top.
Speaker 14:He borrowed that thing and brought it home and I was fooling around with it one day before my dad went to work one morning. He was drinking his last cup of coffee at breakfast and he said son, if you learn to play a tune on that thing by the time I get home I'll. I'll go with with you to town. That's coming tired, and what you don't have enough in your piggy bank, we'll, uh, finish it out I'll finish it out and we'll find you a guitar.
Speaker 14:Well, what he didn't know was I learned a chord or two at school that year from an old boy named Paul Montgomery, and by the time he got back I could play the chords too and sing when the roses bloom in Dixieland and he says well, I guess we'll have to keep my word.
Speaker 14:We went to town and we found me a little Stella guitar, a flat top. It's a smaller size. It wasn't a full dreadnought. It was pretty hard to fret but, lord, I thought I had the king's treasure and I began to try to learn a few chords and strum a few songs, learned a pinch about the Carter family style. You know that style. They used the thumb lead. Anyway, that was my first guitar.
Speaker 1:Wow, the king's treasure.
Speaker 4:God, I love that that was so cool.
Speaker 1:I'm glad we have that. Thanks for preserving those micro tapes, Jeff.
Speaker 3:My pack rat instincts come in handy sometimes. But the next clip here comes from Michael Hedges. I had the privilege of meeting up with him several times and going up to his home studio up in Mendocino, california, on the coast a few years before he passed. It's now end of this year will be the 25th anniversary of the tragic accident that took Michael Hedges from us, but certainly a guitarist who changed everything for a lot of players out there. So it's great to revisit this story of how he got started.
Speaker 2:I think it was oh, jim must have been been 13 and I wanted to be either, peter or Paul, or Peter, paul and Mary. Also, I wanted to be Elvis, but I can't remember which. It must have been around the time, right around the time I Want to Hold your Hand came out. My parents got me a. Was it Regen or something like that? I remember taking lessons on it, but I had a real tough time with the F chord.
Speaker 5:Oh, the F? Chord seems to be the barrier for everybody.
Speaker 2:But the guitar I really remember as being my first guitar that I played a lot on was a Goya classical guitar, but I learned how to basic fingerpicking that and it was pretty easy to play. I just remember that, Goya, you know, I looked at a basic finger-picking app and it was a pretty easy play. I just remember that, Goya, you know, I had it a long time.
Speaker 1:There's another Goya. Is it easier to learn on a nylon string than it is on a steel string?
Speaker 3:as your first guitar, I think it's a pretty common belief that it is mostly because the strings don't dig into your fingers in quite the same way Big ruts, but I don't know in reality though, because classical guitars can have pretty wide necks and can be harder to play in other ways, so it cuts a lot of different ways. I think the main thing is whatever instrument really grabs you, speaks to you, makes you want to play, it is the one you should be playing.
Speaker 1:A lot of people got their first guitar for Christmas, so you know, Santa is definitely a music lover, apparently, as we can hear in this next voicemail from Robin Haynes.
Speaker 16:I went to a professional actor training program at the University of Washington. They told us the first week we were there that we had to learn to play a musical instrument. So I went to a friend and asked him will you teach me to play the guitar? And I asked my parents for a guitar. They gave me a Kahn student model classical guitar for Christmas and I used that that year. The following summer I spent 60 bucks on a used Yamaha FG-150, my first steel string guitar, which I still have, and I traded the Kahn classical for a banjo, a K old Kahn, a K resonator banjo. I think that the other guy got the better half of that deal. I sold the banjo when I graduated from college. That all happened in 1973. Anyway, that's my story. Thanks, bye.
Speaker 1:Here's another one from Jim Horton who writes in my older sister in about 1962, received an inexpensive Sears guitar for Christmas. I took it over and played the hell out of it. I was really into cowboy songs. We had a luthier in Ann Arbor named Herb David. He had a little shop way in a third floor building. It was a gathering spot for folkies of the era. I started hanging around and listening to the Pickers. Herb was a really nice guy and I bugged him to find me a good guitar. He came up with the Martin 016 New Yorker. It had silk and steel strings and it was a great folk guitar and at the time inexpensive. As a poor student I sold it to pay the rent a few years later. How I wish I had it now.
Speaker 1:Here's another reader write-in from Sandy Shirts. She says I received my first guitar, a Regal classical guitar, for Christmas from my parents in 1966 when I was 13 years old. For a year before this my older sister and I would sit on the back porch, she on her guitar and me on my ukulele, playing folk and campfire songs. I found the transition from ukulele to guitar very easy. I'm now learning jazz chords and still have my prized classical guitar. It has wonderful tone.
Speaker 3:And here's a story from Walter Shank Jr. My first guitar was a Christmas present at age 12 or 13. It was a $19.95 Sears Silvertone I think. It was made out of some type of compressed wood, maybe even a type of heavy compressed cardboard. In places the sound and playability was poor, but I took lessons for a year and learned how to read notes and play the first five books of the Alfred's Basic Guitar Method. I paid for the lessons by helping out at the music store and mowing their lawn areas. Unfortunately, my career choice and subsequent practice demands kept me away from further study until fairly recently. Since retirement, I progressed from where I left off with a few much nicer guitars and enjoy it immensely. My love for guitar started at a very early age, listening to Chet Atkins, and never diminished.
Speaker 1:Here's a story from Barrett Hurwitz who writes in. Here's a story from Barrett Hur, from a friend who could play, but Uncle Arthur knew better. You need lessons and can't teach yourself. But I felt confident so I borrowed my uncle's guitar and took it home, convincing my father I could do it. For about a month I played and practiced and learned chords and rudimentary Travis picking until I proved to my father I could play and deserve my own guitar. My dad was generous and encouraging, so we visited our local Tony Pacheco's guitar studio where I set my eyes on a beautiful blonde nylon string Espana guitar made in Sweden. Although it was more expensive than the other guitars Tony had, my dad bought it for me. Within six months I had formed a Peter Paul and Mary type group and we entertained at our high school senior class banquet. Although I later switched to steel string guitars and have a collection of 20, I still have and love that nylon string Espana which I have now owned for 53 years.
Speaker 3:So many of these people who wrote in still have their first guitars. That's really great. They were luckier than I was having my guitar smashed.
Speaker 1:You know, some people got their guitars a gift, Some people got it for Christmas. But let's hear how Tommy Emanuel got his first guitar.
Speaker 17:My first guitar I got for my fourth birthday, so I don't remember it well. I do know that it was a little three-quarter size guitar and it had cowboys painted on it. I don't remember what brand it was, but it was pretty cheap, obviously. And the first thing I learned to play on it was the chords to a Marty Robbins song called Little Green Valley, and my mother used to play it on the steel guitar and I played the rhythm, and that's my first guitar story.
Speaker 3:It makes sense that Tommy Emanuel would have started at age four, though, because he sounds sort of like he's been playing the guitar since birth.
Speaker 1:That's just yes, it makes a lot of sense right. Here's another story about a guitar as a gift. This is from Mitch Levine who writes in my first acoustic was a 69 Guild F312 Brazilian 12-string that my then-fiance bought as an engagement present in 1970. She is still my wife he makes sure to put that in there and I still have the guild. It's been through a couple of major overhauls and repairs but it's built like a tank. I can strum a chord, go for coffee and it's still singing when I get back. Sunburst finish. Just beautiful and well-loved. Jeff, we have heard so many stories about first guitars. When you were putting together that first issue and that feature about my First Guitar, did it have a similar feeling to how you're feeling?
Speaker 3:now.
Speaker 3:In that case I was interviewing all these musicians who went on to be renowned artists in a bunch of different fields and they grew up in very different times, very different circumstances, played different kinds of music, but they all came forward to do this professionally, to make their names as musicians.
Speaker 3:And I think what strikes me listening to these stories now, and all the great stories that people shared, is how you know the people, regardless of what they go on to do in their lives, that this connection that gets forged by being introduced to the guitar changes your life and stays with you no matter what you do.
Speaker 3:And even if you put it aside don't really do it much for decades, you can come back to it and you can be right back in that space that you were when you were 15 years old and just starting to play. So it's just a reminder to me about how you know everybody starts in that place of this sound that grabs you and this desire to make some kind of a sound. And, and you know, the people whose names we never hear of as professional musicians are right in that same zone as the ones who grew up to be legends of the instrument and famous around the world. So, um, it's just a uh learning, discovering the instrument, just just uh. Changes and enriches your life, I think, wherever, wherever you take it or don't take it yeah it.
Speaker 1:It's not about, uh, if you have a music career or if you play a thousand shows or if you become a guitar professor or anything like that. I think it's just about playing it and what it means to you. You know, um, that's a great point that the, you know the players whose names we don't see on the marquee have just as passionate stories as the artists that have gone on to change. You know, guitar playing in one way or another and that are, in a lot of ways, household names. It's that, that bond of that first moment and a lot of the ways that we get to share. That is talking about our first guitars, whether they're the high action K or the Goya or a wonderful handmade instrument specifically for you. Everybody's got that first guitar story and everybody seems to remember it. That's the thing that stood out to me. Everybody was. It was either very fresh in their mind or they sounded like they were having a good time reminiscing about it.
Speaker 3:For sure, and it's really fun for me to hear those stories and think back on it myself.
Speaker 1:We have so many more great guitar stories to share with you. Here's part two of my First Guitar.
Speaker 3:Starting to play is not always easy, of course, so here are some tales of high action and other struggles of beginning guitarists. So here's a story that comes from Jeff Bortley.
Speaker 18:Okay, here's my story about my first guitar. I was 16 in the summer of 1964, and our mother was driving from Maryland to Reno, nevada, to secure a quickie divorce from our dad. My younger brother and sister and I were also in the car Nearing our destination. We stopped in Elko, nevada, where I popped into a music store and there I bought, for the staggering sum of $50, a used large-body K six-string steel string guitar. I'd been playing a beat up little steel string with ridiculously high action up until then, and that K played like a dream and sounded like the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to me.
Speaker 3:So here's a story from Francesco Biraghi. He writes it was June or July 1970. A school fellow, paolo, used to bring his 12-string Hofner guitar to play the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I fell in love immediately with the sound of that instrument, so I asked Santa Claus for a guitar, and my mummy, always sympathetic with her only son, me, found a store with entry-level guitars at a very good price. The result was a purchase of a horrible EKO guitar with steel strings. Starting from that day, our home was full of sounds, in spite of the bloody fingertips.
Speaker 3:Around October of the same year, after a summer of compulsive strumming, my father sat down in my room and told me. After a summer of compulsive strumming, my father sat down in my room and told me my beloved Francesco, why don't you take into consideration to study the guitar with a good teacher? Some weeks after I applied to the Scuola Musical di Milano in the class of the unforgettable maestro Antonio Barbieri, and my first guitar, totally useless for a serious study, was soon replaced by a brand new Yamaha G100A with nylon strings. I stop here. But I must admit that my bad guitar EK0 had been enough to light a flame that still burns 52 years later. And I still own both my terrible EKO and my old Yamaha. By the way, my old school fellow Paolo is a well-reputed guitar maker, and me I am a professor of guitar at the State Conservatory Giuseppe Verdi of Milano, italy.
Speaker 1:That was a twist and a turn and a half. I did not expect him to become a professor of guitar. That was great. That EKO that horrible EKO, as he points out really did light a fire. That stuck with him. I love that one.
Speaker 19:Hi, my name is Jeff. My first guitar was a Sears Silvertone that I ordered by calling Sears and actually placing a mail order for this guitar, and it was not a very good guitar. But I had decided to buy this guitar in the spring of 69, the summer of love, after I realized I could sing. So, anyway, this guitar was really, really in bad shape as far as the action was concerned, but I had no idea that it was bad until I got my next guitar, which was a Yamaha FG-150. It was a Yamaha FG-150. But my brother pawned that guitar on an Ibanez SG lookalike, but he won't admit that he did it. Anyway, I had saved up money from working on the ocean as a deckhand and so it was a guitar that I really missed. And I see it in pictures and I go boy, it looked really good in pictures but it really sounded terrible. Anyway, that's my story. Take care All over.
Speaker 1:We have another story here. A reader, glenn Watt, writes in. In 1965, I had just graduated high school and, with part-time work, bought a new Harmony hollow body F-hole arch top guitar for $29 at a neighborhood music store. It came with black diamond steel strings that turned my fingertips black every time I played it. The action was high, very high, and he spells out V-E-R-Y Very high. A few friends and I started performing in a folk group, the Others. The first song I learned to play on it was the two-chord Tom Dooley. We played Japanese church picnics and food bazaars from Gilroy to Sebastopol. We called it the Chicken Teriyaki Circuit. I quit playing and singing entirely while working and took it up again in retirement. I volunteer at a Sacramento Asian Senior Center teaching ukulele and guitar. In the last 14 years I've started eight uke and guitar clubs that entertain at churches, nursing homes, hospitals, museums, health fairs, etc. I have cancer, though clear now, but it's been a great life filled with friends, guitars and music.
Speaker 3:Wow, what a fantastic retirement plan that is.
Speaker 1:Here is reader Jim McNabb, who writes in my dad played his grandmother's guitar on the radio before becoming a businessman. His first guitar purchase with his own money was a Kalamazoo, and it became my first when I was in high school. I didn't know how he managed to play it. The action was high and the strings were like cables. I put plastic strings on it. My parents told me that if I played it for a year they would give me a guitar of my choice. I did, and they gave me a Goya G10, a good Goya when they were still made in Sweden. And here's a story about another Apache lover. It wasn't just Richard Thompson, acoustic guitar. Reader Paul Balmer writes in it was Liverpool, england, 1960.
Speaker 1:I was nine and nearing Christmas I listened to Apache by the shadows on my dad's record player. What would you like for Christmas, said dad. I want whatever is making that sound, I exclaimed so off. We went to a local Liverpool music store, hesse's, where the then-unknown John Lennon earlier bought his first guitar from the same guy. The five-pound, half-sized monstrosity was strung with brass strings and was unplayable. I also received the Francis N Day guitar tutor, which starts with Tune your guitar to the piano. We had no piano, which starts with tune your guitar to the piano we had no piano and then suggests you learn all 72 chromatic notes on the six strings up to the 12th fret. Fortunately, a kindly French teacher spotted the unplayable guitar and sent me to Hesse's for some nylon strings and a clock key to adjust the neck angle. We restrung the guitar, tuned it up and two years later I was on TV playing with the school band the Francis and Day Tudor, which I still have.
Speaker 3:Remains indecipherable, all these stories about these terrible first guitars just make me appreciate all the more how good the low-end, entry-level guitars are. Now they're pretty easy to find ones that are well set up, that have good sound, that you don't have to battle to play, so that's just been a huge advantage.
Speaker 1:It's hard to overstate the importance the Beatles had on the world, so let's take a look at how they inspired a whole generation to pick up the guitar. Here's Bob Capo who writes in. After seeing the Beatles on TV in 1964, I pestered my parents enough to take me for lessons I was just turning nine years old and they agreed to rent a Stella guitar from the store for three months to see if I would stick with it. I did. Then the deal was made Another three months with the rental and they would buy a guitar for Christmas. So I stuck with it. And for that Christmas in 1964, I received a new Gibson ES-120T, which I still own, and started my collection, which is currently 72 guitars. In 1971, on the suggestion that the Beatles remove the finish on several of their guitars, I did the same. It really did sound better, but I soon regretted losing that beautiful sunburst finish.
Speaker 3:Wait a minute. He said he has 72 guitars right.
Speaker 1:That is a lot of guitars that would keep a person busy.
Speaker 3:So here is another story that comes from Les Deegan. Pop music only had an effect on me when I heard the Beatles and they came from the same place as I, liverpool. I had to learn to play guitar, just had to. I had a friend who lived near me who was older and had a job. I knew he had a couple of battered guitars which he'd bought. One of these guitars had no strings on it and I asked him if I could buy it. It was an acoustic with no branding on it, but it didn't matter, it was a guitar. He said I could buy it for one pound. I was 14 years old and helped my dad in the butcher shop at weekends, so I had the one pound to buy the battered guitar.
Speaker 3:My Jamaican uncle was an engineer and could do most anything. He took the guitar and stripped it down, sprayed it red. It looked fantastic. I bought strings and put them on and the action was pretty good. I taught myself to play on that old guitar. I transferred to bass some years later but still play guitar. I've had a great musical life thanks to my one-pound red guitar". Of course, some people who get introduced to the guitar at a young age decide not only that they want to play it, but they want to make one themselves. So here is a story that comes from Dick Boak, a long, storied career with Martin Guitars.
Speaker 20:Hi, this is Dick Boak from my home in Nazareth, pennsylvania. I'm here with my very first guitar. I suppose I should be a little embarrassed to tell you I didn't buy the guitar. But I, from my home in Nazareth, pennsylvania, I'm here with my very first guitar. I suppose I should be a little embarrassed to tell you I didn't buy the guitar, but I made it in my basement.
Speaker 20:I really wanted a sitar after hearing Ravi Shankar and George Harrison play the sitar early on, I guess around the time of Rubber Soul. So I went down to the basement and I got a two by four and some quarter inch plywood and some mat board, a little bit of leather for the pick guard and some brass wire to put the frets in. I didn't know where the frets should go, so I drilled pairs of holes a 16th of an inch apart all the way up the neck so that I could locate the frets. And then it has nine strings and it still works more or less Kind of the way I tune it, uh, uh. Well, the novelty wears off pretty quickly, but I'm actually quite proud of it. I think I was 15 or 16 years old at the time and this led to many other instruments made in my basement. In my basement. It did get me started on a long career with musical instruments and a tremendous job at Martin Guitarist, so I guess these instruments serve their purpose.
Speaker 1:We've got a reader who also built his own guitar, ian Johnson. He writes in growing up in the UK in the late 40s and early 50s, I loved the new rock and roll music and also started listening to blues, country and folk. There was no way I would ever have enough money for a real guitar, so I decided to make one. I went to the woodwork master at school and said Please, sir, can I make a guitar in the woodwork room after school? When he stopped laughing he said Okay, johnson, so long as you bring your own materials.
Speaker 1:I found a picture of Buddy Holly holding his Stratocaster at right angles to the camera so I could copy the shape. I won't go into detail about all the hurdles I had to cross, but the electrics were where I finally was defeated. The man in our local radio shop helped me make a low impedance pickup so I could play it through our old radio. When I left school and got a job, I finally bought a real guitar and sold this for a few pounds to a junk shop. A week or two later I saw it being played on stage at a nearby youth club. It takes a lot of drive to, I think, persevere in that project when all you have is a photo and a lot of mistakes to go by. You know, speaking of saving up for that first guitar, if you weren't able to build your own in the woodshop you could just save every penny you got. Here's a clip of a 1960 paper route guitar.
Speaker 21:It was 1960 on a Sunday morning and I'd stopped at a house nearby to collect on my paper route. Inside I could hear someone playing a blues tune on a guitar. The lady of the house asked if I'd like to come in and listen. The guy was playing a Gibson J45. He asked if I'd like to learn to play and offered to teach me after school. Excitedly, I peddled home and told my dad who said with a smirk of reservation if you learn to play one song, I'll buy you a guitar. Next Sunday I woke up. My parents sat at the end of the bed with the neighbor's guitar and played and sang a very short, humorous version of. After the Ball Was Over, the next day Dad bought me a Harmony Sober new jumbo guitar. I played that guitar until 1962, but traded it at $90 for a moderately worn 1928 Martin 0018 from a used guitar shop in Kansas City, missouri. Such a deal, and I've played it ever since. If I can make it to age 82, it'll still be playing sweetly at 100 years old.
Speaker 1:And here's another paper route guitar from Gordon Scott who writes in my first guitar was a Guild M20, the so-called Nick Drake guitar. I bought it with my paper route money in the fall of 1960, I think it cost $100. The tax was $4. The serial number suggests it was made in 1957. My guitar teacher was introducing me to jazz progressions, but I wanted to play folk music. I had three lessons with Jerry Garcia using that guitar, which is why I learned to cotton pick with two fingers instead of three. The guitar traveled around with me when I was in the Navy. I'd play Oki from Muskogee and Fixin' to Die Rag in the Gulf of Tonkin. When I bought my first Dreadnought another guild I lent the M20 to my brother. We still have it and it sounds like silver bells. Here's a voicemail from Bruce Gowan.
Speaker 22:I actually bought my first guitar at Sears in Spartanburg, south Carolina, in 1968. With the $27.95, I made Picking Cotton on my family's cotton farm Probably the last person you'll ever hear say that. I bought the guitar a cowboy model that I still have 50 years later 50-plus years later and a guitar songbook. It had the pictures of the chords and how to make them and how to strum. It wasn't a mail bay, it was somebody else's and it was long lost and fell apart. But the first song I learned was Go Tell Aunt Rhody, and then Down in the Valley was C, g and D the first three chords. So I still had the guitar, learned to play, bought a better one in high school, had a brief stint as a duet performer which helped me get a scholarship to college, so that Sears guitar paid for itself many times over it's amazing what a big role that Sears played in people's stories here, including mine.
Speaker 3:My guitar was a Sears guitar. Here's another reader story that comes from Don Kellett. I was nine years old and my parents had been asking me about music lessons. My mom, my older sister, played piano. I declined. I really wanted to play guitar. Then they wanted me to sign up for accordion lessons. At that point I was financially somewhat independent, had a paper route and said I would buy my own guitar and pay for my lessons. Parents were not thrilled this was the Elvis era but conceded and we went to a local music shop in Port Credit, ontario, where I purchased a baby Stella, the three-quarter size version, complete with sunburst finish, started taking lessons and I have never stopped playing guitar. Not sure what happened to the Stella A couple of years later it was traded in for a Hoffner electric guitar and amp.
Speaker 1:Here's a voicemail from Charles Joseph.
Speaker 23:We didn't have a lot of money growing up. My mom, my dad, couldn't give me money to buy the guitar I wanted. So I went to my Aunt Dolly, and she agreed to buy it, but I had to earn enough money for half the guitar. So I said okay. So I had to clean out the shed, had to cut grass, had to do some other chores, help her clean the house, and after a few days I earned enough money for half of the guitar. And my aunt kept her promise, promise and she bought the guitar. I used my money and she used her money. It was a.
Speaker 23:My first guitar was a K with the F holes and this guy, rex, he could play. So he showed me the song Peter Gunn Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. So I was playing that over and over again. I was driving my mother nuts with it and eventually I learned some other songs from some other guys that played the guitar. And then I got you know music, books and stuff like that and learned the songs I wanted to learn. That's my first guitar, okay, k with the F holes. All right, thank you.
Speaker 1:Here's another story from Randy Becker about using his own money to buy his first guitar. He writes in I came home from school one day in 1969. Mom was watching TV and I saw Chet Atkins playing Yankee, doodle and Dixie at the same time on one guitar. I thought to myself I need to learn how to do that. I was 12 years old. I took a hammer to my piggy bank, gathered my entire life savings and $14 to the base exchange and bought a three-quarter size steel string, mile-high action laminated guitar and a Mel Bay chord book. When I got home I blew past the part about tuning and started to learn how to finger chords. In that first week I wrote my first song, a not-too-subtle ripoff of Paul Revere's Indian Nation. My lack of tuning wasn't a problem for me, but my family was not impressed. Finally, taking their complaints seriously, I went back to the page about tuning and suddenly everything sounded better. It's been a long but wonderful 51-year journey with many twists and turns, but I'm forever grateful to my mom for having the TV on that afternoon.
Speaker 3:Lots of folks have gotten their first guitars in the mail, ordering them from catalogs, and here's a story about that from Marv Kruger. He writes my first guitar is a Sears and Roebuck mail-order guitar my dad bought sometime around 1940. In 1957, dad, grandpa and a man named Elmer started building us a new house. The old house was raised up on timbers and moved to a yard space and used for a feed shed. One day in 1963, I noticed a door in the peak of the feed shed, got a ladder and started exploring with my 10-year-old imagination running wild of hidden Jesse James loot that must be there. Instead I found this Sears and Roebuck archtop guitar and a Smiley Burnett songbook. I drug this guitar down the ladder and it became mine. I still play it today.
Speaker 1:Reader, gene Zerler. I'm sorry, gene, if I pronounced your name wrong. Gene Zerler writes in. In 1959, I was eight years old and we lived in Lexington, massachusetts, near Boston, where the folk music scene was happening. The songs of Woody Guthrie and recordings by Pete Seeger made a strong impression on me and I asked my mother if I could take guitar lessons. She found a guitar teacher named Peter Lentz who was a folk singer in the Boston coffeehouses.
Speaker 1:I don't remember much about my very first guitar, but I suspect that it was ordered from the Sears catalog. It didn't have much tone and it was difficult to play. I took my first lessons on that guitar and had some success in spite of the limitations. As my playing improved, peter suggested to my parents that I needed a better instrument. In 1960, I was given a new Martin D-18. I'm not sure why that make and model was selected for me, but I suspect it was Peter's choice. It was perfect for an adult folk singer in Boston, but it was too large for a nine-year-old boy and I recall that I played with a capo on the third to the fifth fret until my arm was long enough to reach down to the end of the neck. So my first guitar was nothing special, but my second guitar was the one I played that D-18 through high school and got involved with playing in rock bands, switched to electric guitar for a while, then I went off to college and medical school and did not play guitar for a number of years.
Speaker 1:In the 1980s my dad was getting ready to move out of our old house and he called to ask what he should do with my old guitars. I was reunited with my D-18, so I started playing again and going to guitar and songwriting workshops. I have acquired a number of other guitars and instruments over the years, but the D-18 still serves as the foundation of my playing style and the heart of my collection. The serial number indicates it was made sometime in 1959. The serial number indicates it was made sometime in 1959. It has the classic D18 spruce top, mahogany back and sides, mahogany neck and ebony fingerboard with closed deluxe metal tuners. It does not have an adjustable truss rod and required a re-fret and neck reset in the 1990s. Otherwise it's unchanged from the day it left the Martin factory. Here's another story about a high-action guitar.
Speaker 12:I grew up in Lakeland, florida. I was about 10 years old, I think, and taking some guitar lessons from a local teacher. I went to a music store with my dad. They had this guitar hanging on the wall that had a pickup in it, an acoustic guitar with a pickup in it, which really impressed me. The name brand on the guitar there was a logo that just said Fame, and the action was so high on the thing I could barely press the strings down, but it had a pickup and I was impressed and that was my first guitar that my dad paid, I think, $35 for.
Speaker 12:And then I bought a little Gibson amp from one of my brother's friends about six months later for $20. He'd torn off the grill and he had a little piece of like zebra skin fabric you know zebra print fabric hanging over the front of the speaker and it was all blown out and worn out and neither thing was good enough for me to learn anything. The action was so high that I actually took the bridge out of the saddle to get the strings just a little lower. I didn't know anything about adjusting the neck, I don't even know if it had a truss rod. It had two screws on the bridge. That did absolutely nothing, but I did love that guitar for several years and I ended up, I think that's the only guitar I've ever sold to another kid.
Speaker 12:in junior high I sold the amp and the guitar for 25 bucks. Anyway, that's the story of my first guitar. Have a nice day.
Speaker 1:So some of us have had unorthodox let's say introductions to the guitar. Here's a great story about someone who started playing guitar to quit smoking.
Speaker 10:Hi, I'm 32 years old. I was wanting to quit smoking and I'd always wanted to learn how to play guitar. A new coworker of mine played and offered to teach me, and he was also a part-time bull rider. And he broke his arm and so he brought his guitar and a guitar book Alfred's Basic Guitar Method to work one morning and said here I can't play, why don't you teach yourself? So I quit smoking, used his guitar and got hooked. That Christmas a local guitar store had a spot in the mall and they were having a going-out-of-business sale and had their guitars half off. So I went in, looked around, found this beautiful little Alvarez six string acoustic and bought it, and that was my first guitar. Thank you.
Speaker 1:And if quitting smoking wasn't an unusual enough way to start playing guitar, here's one that features ping pong and a gambling debt, but maybe not in the way you think Richard Weissman writes in. When I was 17 years old, I was a student at Goddard College in Plainfield, vermont. I was also a semi-professional table tennis player, ranked number seven in the country for boys under 18. The way that table tennis worked the only way you could make money playing was to gamble. I regularly played one student from Baltimore and he worked up a huge paper debt to me. It became obvious that this couldn't continue, so one day he suggested that we go to his room and I find something in there to satisfy the debt.
Speaker 1:I found a Harmony Monterey F-hole guitar. The action was very high, but the idea of getting a free guitar was appealing. I played that guitar for about two years, developing quite a set of calluses. In my junior year I went to school in New York and Jerry Silverman, my guitar teacher at the time, suggested I might want to get something a bit more playable if I ever expected to improve my skills. I bought a Favilla guitar and discarded the harmony. I don't remember what I did with it, but I was happy to see it go. This was the only time that my table tennis and music careers coincided. Well, here's a clip from Andy Marino, who found his guitar in the most unlikely of places.
Speaker 8:My first guitar was. I found it in the garbage can and one of my neighbor's garbage cans that had a hole in the back. It was a Stella, a guitar harmony Stella I think it was and it had three strings on it. And I lived pretty close to Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn so I used to go fishing, so I put on some fishing line. The thin, thinnest line I had was for the E string and then I worked my way down how to replace the G string and also the A string with thicker line and that's what I started playing guitar on back in 1964 and thanks so much. Bye.
Speaker 1:Bye-bye. If anybody remembers the blue chip stamps, this one's for you.
Speaker 24:When I was a teenager years ago, there was a thing called blue chip stamps and if you bought things like at the gas station and the market, they would give you so many blue chip stamps to put in a book. They would give you so many blue chip stamps to put in a book and after you had enough books you could exchange it for different things. My mom got me and my brother a blue chip stamp guitar, which I'm sure was a piece of junk, but I rarely played it. My brother played it mostly, and anyway, that's my story. Fortunately, I can afford better guitars today. Thank you very much, Bye-bye.
Speaker 1:Here's a story about someone who wants to pass down his first guitar, and it just got me really thinking about how the joy that the guitars and the music that they make bring to us can really last a lot longer than we might initially think that they can.
Speaker 15:This is Shelton Spicer. I'm just calling about the article on your first guitar. I got my first guitar my parents sacrificed a lot to buy it back in November of 1960, a Gibson Spanish guitar model LGO R6593-17. Case and all was $70.74. And I still own it today and I'm going to give it to my oldest son to put in a glass case when I pass away. And the first thing I ever played on it was Wildwood Blower. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Jeff, we have heard so many stories about first guitars. When you were putting together that first issue and that feature about my first guitar, did it have a similar feeling to how you're feeling now?
Speaker 3:In that case, I was interviewing all these musicians who went on to be renowned artists in a bunch of different fields and they grew up in very different times, very different circumstances, played different kinds of music, but they all came forward to do this professionally, to make their names as musicians.
Speaker 3:I think what strikes me listening to these stories now, and all the great stories that people shared, is how the people, regardless of what they go on to do in their lives, um, that this connection that gets forged by being introduced to the guitar, um, changes your life and stays with you no matter what you do. And even if you put it aside don't really do it much for decades, you can come back to it and you can read right back in that space that you were when you were 15 years old and just starting to play. So it's just a reminder to me about how everybody starts in that place, of this sound that grabs you and this desire to make some kind of a sound. And and, uh, you know the, the people whose names we never hear of as professional musicians, are right in that same zone as the, the ones who grew up to be legends of the instrument and famous around the world. So, um, it's just a uh uh. Learning, discovering the instrument just changes and enriches your.
Speaker 1:That, I think it's just about playing it and what it means to you. You know that's a great point, that the you know the players whose names we don't see on the marquee have just as passionate stories as the artists that have gone on to change. You know guitar playing in one way or another and that are, in a lot of ways, household names. It's that bond of that first moment and a lot of the ways that we get to share. That is talking about our first guitars, whether they're the high action K or the Goya or a wonderful handmade instrument specifically for you. Everybody's got that first guitar story and everybody seems to remember it. That's the thing that stood out to me. Everybody was.
Speaker 3:it was either very fresh in their mind or they sounded like they were having a good time reminiscing about it, for sure they sounded like they were having a good time reminiscing about it For sure, and it's really fun for me to hear those stories and think back on it myself.
Speaker 1:The Acoustic Guitar Podcast is brought to you by the team at Acoustic Guitar Magazine. I'm your host, nick Grizzle, joined for this episode by Jeffrey Pepper Rogers. Our theme song was composed by Adam Perlmutter and performed for this episode by Jeffrey Pepper Rogers. Our theme song was composed by Adam Perlmutter and performed for this episode by Jeffrey Pepper Rogers. The Acoustic Guitar Podcast is directed and edited by Joey Lusterman. Tanya Gonzalez is our producer. Executive producers for the Acoustic Guitar Podcast are Lizzie Lusterman and Stephanie Campos-Dalbray. Thank you to everyone who sent recorded messages, left voicemails and wrote in to share the stories of their first guitar for this episode. We really appreciate it. Eric Bibb, bruce Coburn, courtney Hartman, richard Thompson, bajie Asad, sharon Isbin, tommy Emanuel, dick Boak and the dozens of readers and fans of Acoustic Guitar Magazine. Dick Boak and the dozens of readers and fans of Acoustic Guitar magazine. Join us again next month for the Acoustic Guitar podcast where we chat with Tommy Emanuel in a conversation you definitely don't want to miss. Thank you so much for your support.
