I was born in Walker County, Alabama, during Roy Acuff's second year on the Grand Ole Opry. I don't remember not wanting to play music and, once I got a few chords under my calluses, I don't remember not wanting to be a member of the Opry. Well, at least I grew up to spend a lot of time at the Opry and even got to play for Mr. Roy in his dressing room, yet performing on the stage has remained an elusive dream. Am I disappointed? Not disastrously so, which has surprised me from time to time until I realized that, although I love attention and being around people as much as anyone, my deep love for music surpasses any need to derive money or, for that matter, attention from it. When we started planning this website, Sherm The Webmaster suggested the story and some photos of my Gibson LG-1, so here goes.
My FIRST guitar was an arched-top that I can't tell you much about because it burned in our house fire when I was ten years old. Family legend has it that Dad would come in from the fields or whatever and entertain me while Mama got supper ready. If his fingers got tired or he was just too tired, he would lay his guitar in the crib and let me entertain myself. When I was eighteen months old, he traded working on the family farm/fish camp for military construction work, but the guitar continued its role in keeping me content.
One of the most-told stories in our family: after jobs in Tennessee (where my sister Linda was born) and Georgia (where my sister Margaret was born), we wound up spending most of World War II in Mobile, Alabama, where Dad worked in the shipyard. A guy he worked with said something about wanting a guitar. "I've got one I'll sell you for fifty dollars," Dad told him. The following Sunday afternoon, the prospective buyer came to see the guitar -- Dad pulled it out of the case and immediately spotted the marks I had left along the binding and said, "Those are my little boy's toothprints, Fella; I can't sell that guitar." Well, he COULD have, but he didn't, not even for the help fifty bucks would have been. From that point on, it was regarded in the family as "Bill's guitar."
In 1946, we moved to Newberry County, South Carolina, where my aunt, Geneva, got to know a local hillbilly band, Joe Morris and the Silver Dew Boys. Good instruments were hard to come by and their lead guitar player had one in the process of being lined up, but, in the meantime, GeeGee asked me if he could borrow my guitar and put an electric pickup on it. Wow, I didn't even know to say "Cool!" but it was a real thrill for us to visit the radio studio one night and realize that was MY guitar making all that really exciting music. I had always been into music, but that might have been the moment I really got socked into the business of music.
Unfortunately, as you already know, that guitar and just about everything else we owned went up in flames in November of 1949. I was ten years old and under a doctor's care for a condition that had kept me bedridden the preceding winter. Seeing how upset I was, the doctor's prescription: "Buy that boy whatever vestige of a guitar you can afford, no matter how cheap -- just so it's a guitar." Sears had one they boasted in the catalogue as being "a real guitar for under ten dollars." That was my primary Christmas present that year -- the only one I remember, in fact.
My little Silvertone held up quite well for a while, even with my kidstyle playing that was more instinct than knowledge and was less off key some times than others. HOWEVER, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving of 1953 (I was in the eighth grade), I started taking honest-to-goodness guitar lessons from Cliff Edwards -- within a year, the little Silvertone not only had a hole in the top a la Willie Nelson, it had craters in the fingerboard in front of the first three frets and required new nut and bridge bones. During the summer after the ninth grade, the tuning peg for the first string literally disintegrated. Guess what? Press the second string down on the fifth fret, and you have the same note as the first string open, so the second string at the sixth fret is the same as the first string at the first fret, and on and on -- hey I just kept on practicing, using someone else's instrument for public performances.
My big dream was to buy a Gibson guitar and, sure 'nuff, Greenwood Music Company had one in the window, priced at one hundred dollars. Nobody told me it was a student model, not intended for the rigors of professional music, but, what the heck, I was playing a lot, but nobody paid me enough to be considered professional. Money was the main issue and Dad offered to help me plant two rows of okra in our garden (a BIG garden) and what money I made from selling okra to a produce peddler neighbor, Tom Williams, could go toward that Gibson in town. So, in 1956, during the tenth grade, I got a "new" Gibson -- quotes on new because we learned some forty years later that the guitar had actually been built in 1948 and had apparently been aging in the music store window.
Short version of the story: Larry Broome, David Ayers, and I formed a band round about that time and that little, lightweight guitar got a lot of honest wear and tear. Several bass players worked with us during my high school years and John Bailey came on board a couple of weeks after Castro took over Cuba. We played anywhere people would invite us and were not above requesting invitations. At least once a week, with or without other gigs, we gathered at my house to practice, all of us sharing whatever we were learning from whatever sources we had access to.
Other guitars came and went in my life for various reasons and under various circumstances, but "the little Gibson," its current official designation in my family, has stayed the course, even though it was unplayable for maybe fifteen years. In 1996, old friend Ed Miller took it to Dale Steele at Morrison Brothers Music in Jackson, Mississippi, for restoration. I won't explain tap tuning, but that fifty-year-old wood got loving luthier treatment and I really got back into music -- well, I hadn't been away, as such, but I had stopped performing and writing songs in deference to the time demands of the entertainment journalism work that had pulled me into those circles quite soon after moving to Nashville in 1965. There had been a number of recording endeavors over the years, but no releases -- "This is good stuff," I was regularly told, "but where would it fit on radio?" I still don't know about radio but I know that the songs wouldn't go away, the guitar didn't go away, and neither did I.
Hope you enjoy.
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