Bottleneck Brown

7″x5″ oil on canvas

This painting is AVAILABLE. Please email me at CokerArt@yahoo.com for price.

“I’ve said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.”  -B.B. King, 1925-

I love the blues, particularly old time acoustic country blues. I’ve played guitar since I was 18 years old, mostly acoustic, mostly folk styles like Bluegrass and Blues. I’ve enjoyed playing with friends and family through the years. I highly recommend it. The image of an old black man with a beat up old National steel guitar, or an old white man frailing away on an open-back banjo touches something deep inside me. Musically, they are about as rootsy and down in the dirt as it gets. Banging out an ancient tone on an equally ancient instrument is a very spiritual matter and one that acoustic players take very seriously.

I had a very good friend, Mac McCormick,  who was a luthier. For the unwashed, that’s an instrument maker. They build guitars, banjos, mandolins and fiddles, or violins if you love your music on the classical side. Mac passed away in recent years. He was a classic curmudgeon, long and lean, bent at the shoulders, with a scruffy beard and long, crazy eyebrows that sprouted over the top of his glasses kind of medusa-like. He wore worn, faded, beltless Wrangler jeans stained by years of wiping wood glue and stain from his knarly-knuckled fingers as he worked.  He wore once-white t-shirts covered in saw dust that hung loosely on his skinny frame like hanging on a coat rack. His constant cowboy boots were scuffed and stained from years of wear and tear and navigating sawdust-covered floors. He cut big slits in the tops of them to ease the pain of his bunions, which exposed the white athletic socks he wore every day. He rolled his own cigarettes from sweet-smelling, Captain Black pipe tobacco that hung mindlessly in the corner of his mouth while sanding wood or any of a hundred other tasks that were alien to the average visitor.  He would work around said visitors, tolerating their imposing presence only because they may be a customer. If he had his way, he would just build instruments and never have to deal with selling them. Sound familiar?

I was always amazed that this man, maybe the most unkempt, at times, straight up contemptable man that I ever knew, could take a block of wood, maybe spruce or walnut and shape it into a beautiful, one-of-a-kind instrument that sounded every bit as beautiful as it looked. I have the pleasure of owning one of those pieces, a funky, resophonic blues guitar designed and constructed after a classic 1918 National steel guitar that was in his shop at the time. He took measurements off the original and in a few weeks called me to come and get my new baby. That was August of 1996. That guitar has a voice that fills a room and kicks like a mule when played with a bottleneck slide. Yes, I call her “The Mule”. I traded art work for her, my craft for his. One of the best deals I ever made. I never get the blues when I play that guitar, mainly because it reminds me of the man who built it. I miss you, Mac.  Enjoy!