My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  I told her that I have long auburn hair and would be wearing a brown silk scarf printed with red poppies.

  Unable to sleep, I woke early the next morning and stepped out for a walk, passing by schoolchildren who were neatly lined up on Moscow Street in uniforms, bright red scarves tied at the necks of very long brown tweed coats clearly purchased oversized so they’d fit the following year. In Notting Hill, I overheard a mother sound like any mother the world over as she pushed her child along with an air of resigned exasperation, “If only we’d left a few minutes earlier, we wouldn’t have to rush so!”

  It was the last day of November. At that time of year, the light fades quickly in London, just past mid-afternoon. I’d scouted out the neighborhood near the designated coffee shop and noted a bus stop where I could loiter with seeming purpose and not look like a complete idiot. The refuge also allowed me to sort out how I was going to approach the counterperson inside the coffee shop. I knew that if you dared to walk into a coffee shop in New York City and ask if there was a phone message waiting for you at the counter, you’d be tossed promptly to the curb with a sneer and a resounding “Geddouddaheeyah.”

  When I’d scraped up sufficient courage, I pushed my way through the front door and told the girl at the counter that I was about to ask her an odd question. Was there a phone message waiting for me at all? Me, Julia? She smiled, squinted strangely at me and assured me there was no such message.

  I stepped outside, feeling joyously elated yet ill. I had been sick with anticipation along with the weight of knowing that at least half of the world — the half composed of diehard, lighter-waving Led Zeppelin fans — would probably tear me into bitty pieces if it meant they could trade places at this very moment. Here I was, an unworthy, uncool rock ’n’ roll ignoramus of a classical guitar journalist about to meet the Wizard of All Rock Guitar. I decided in that very moment that I would shut out the swirl of preconceptions, hearsay and idle crap foisted upon me by well-meaning friends and stick to my interview questions.

  Les Paul

  Les Paul is legendary for creating an amplified solid-body electric guitar that could play without distortion — the renowned Gibson Les Paul guitar. He realized that if the body of the guitar was solid and did not vibrate, it meant that the sound of the plucked strings would sustain longer. Les Paul also engineered the first 8-track recorder, marketed by Ampex. He won a Grammy for a 1976 album of instrumental duets with Chet Atkins, called Chester and Lester, and also for an album released in 2005, American Made, World Played, featuring guest spots with various Gibson-playing rock stars.

  My first guitar came from a Sears-Roebuck catalog. I was seven years old when I sent away for it and it had cost $3.95. At first, I was interested in playing the piano but my mother criticized it. “With a piano, you’ve got your back turned to the audience,” she told me. “How are you going to play a piano at the beach or in the back seat of a car? It’s not convenient.” So I switched to playing drums and she immediately ordered that out of the house. I got an accordion and that — I agree with everybody — is one instrument that should be in the city dump. I finally whittled it down: the best thing for me to do was play the guitar, my harmonica and sing.

  I still have that Sears-Roebuck guitar. Mother was in the kitchen when it arrived and she told me, “Well, you can undo the box in the dining room.” I was very anxious to tear this carton open, see the guitar and play it. As I took it out of the cardboard wrapping, one of the strings got caught in that cardboard and went ping! My mother came rushing through that swinging door of the kitchen and said, “Lester, you sound great on that thing already!”

  In 1942, I was asked who my ten favorite guitar players were. My first was Andrés Segovia, the second was Django Reinhardt, the third one was Eddie Mack and my list went on to the top ten guitar players at that time. It was hard to find more than seven guitar players that you could rave about, who were popular and well known — ones who inspired you to learn how to play. That’s how rare the guitar was in those days.

  I only took one music lesson, from a lady named Miss Wilson. It was a piano lesson and she pinned a note on my lapel telling my mother to save her money and not have me come back. The reason for this was whenever she sat down and played something for me, I played it right after her. She said, “Oh, you’re my number one pupil! This is terrific.” She couldn’t believe how fast I learned. But she did not realize that by listening and watching what she was doing, I could memorize and play it instantly. Of course, she found this out when she selected a piece of strange music for me to sight-read. Because she did not play it, I did not play it. That’s when she realized I was a person who played by ear, not by reading music. So I was out.

  My brother thought my studying music was a boring waste of time. He didn’t like music and he didn’t particularly understand it. My mother loved music. She was very much an important part of my life for how she encouraged me. My brother would say, “He’s at it again, Ma,” as if to say, “Get rid of him!” Radio broadcasts always sounded like they were from a tight-sounding room. Back in those days, they used to broadcast from a hotel room. I began to practice in the bathroom, where there was tile, because it had a great echo. I figured out how to place my guitar halfway between the bedroom and the bathroom for the best sound. My brother was ready to place me in the outhouse.

  From the very beginning, I was always interested in sound and music and finding out how things worked. Back then I couldn’t go to Home Depot so I had to figure things out by myself. Mother wanted a piano, a Victrola, a telephone and a radio in the house and I was tempted to find out how these things worked. I’d performed a hysterectomy on the piano. Then I took the phone apart. I managed to rig the mouthpiece of Mom’s phone and hook it up to the radio and heard myself talk and play the harmonica on it.

  I had a lot of first gigs. The very first gig, we were on a truck — The Optimist Club, we were called. I wore a wig, blacked-out a tooth and I had my bass player — we called him Susie — dressed up like a girl. He also played the banjo. We had this truck all loaded up with all these people as Red Hot Red and the Optimists. I was about thirteen years old. This was in Springfield, Missouri, and these Chicago guys heard us. It was during the Depression era. Al Capone was at his peak of fame. We played at the WLS Barn Dance. I had my dreams and set a goal, making sure it was not so difficult I’d give up. I was reasonably certain that I could succeed if I had courage and the willingness to practice.

  During the night, I was Rhubarb Red, playing hillbilly songs, and from noon on I was Les Paul. Performing allowed me to be two people, and it was the best of all worlds. For my first job, I rigged the PA system with Mom’s radio. I was playing at a BBQ stand in Waukesha, Wisconsin, when a music critic pulled up to order a hamburger. He wrote me a note from his rumble seat while ordering food, “Hey, Red, I can hear your jokes and singing but I can’t hear the guitar.” You see, the guitar was not loud enough.

  My first idea to solve this was to take Dad’s radio and use that, too, but then I’d thought to use the magnetic pickups made by Bell Labs inside the telephone. I took the phonograph needle and cartridge and jammed it into my guitar. It howled with feedback. I stuffed towels and shirts and socks inside that guitar. I even filled that Sears guitar with plaster of paris. This seemed to help a little with taming the feedback.

  I made another guitar from a two-by-four piece of railroad track and stretched a string across it. This was my precursor to the “log.” I ran to my mother and yelled, “I’ve got it!” She just looked at that string stretched across a railroad track and said, “That’ll be the day, when you see Gene Autry riding upon a horse holding a piece of railroad track.” She shot me down so I went back to using wood. I made the same guitar but it looked like a log. When I played it at a club, people were not too impressed. I came home wondering what had gone wrong. That’s when I realized people sometimes hear with their eyes instead of their ears. So I remade the log into the shape of a guitar, went back into
that club and brought the house down.

  When I showed this guitar to executives at Gibson, they later told me they’d laughed at me, calling my guitar a “broomstick with a pickup.” This was about in 1947 or 1948. They made only four of these guitars and were hesitant to make more. The first ones looked like an ironing board with a pickup, so they had me come in and look at Stradivarius violins for their lovely shape. I wanted something nice so you could love it and hug it, so we chose to make the guitar with similar curves. When they asked me what color I wanted it to be, my answer was “gold.” Why? My first car had a gold-colored finish.

  It was a big leap for Gibson to go from making just hollow-body guitars to solid. Hollow bodies tend to vary in sound from instrument to instrument and we wanted to be able to repeat construction and have the same response. To this day, Gibson still makes guitars with the pickups exactly where I placed them. If the pickups are moved, they will pick up something and lose something. I picked a point of placement where the sound is most pleasing.

  What I love about the guitar is everything that has happened throughout my career and all the people I have met along the way. When I play onstage, there will be a musician who comes and sits in and I’ll say, “I wonder why he does what he does,” or “That’s strange, I’ve never seen that done before.” At eighty-nine, I am still learning. And today, with the guitar, nobody plays alike. Everyone plays different styles, different tunes. Everybody’s up for grabs and that’s what makes it so wonderful. It’s full of surprises. If you play the piano and hit a key right there, that note is fixed on the keyboard and never moves. But on the guitar, that note is everywhere, absolutely everywhere on that guitar. So it’s quite a challenge because of the difference in the instrument that you’re playing. The guitar has so much more flexibility.

  I have had moments where I’ve thought to myself that I’ll never conquer the instrument. Sometimes the other side of the fence looks better as I will admire what another person is doing. One time, Pat Martino, George Benson, Wes Montgomery and myself were standing out on the corner at eight o’clock in the morning, talking after work, and the four of us were complimenting each other on what we knew. One guitarist said, “If only I could do what you do.” And another guitarist said, “Well, if only I could do what you do.” That’s when I said, “Do you realize how much talent is standing on this corner? And how different they are? One doesn’t need to use a pick, the other one does. And we all admire what the other guy does — in most cases.” There are a few dogs out there that we won’t talk about.

  The one thing I can say about a guitar is that as soon as you hit a note, it sounds sweet and nice. You can’t say that about a clarinet player. If you give a kid a clarinet, you’ll want to kill him for about the first five years. And a violin, without a doubt, is the worst. You hear that guy pick up a violin and go through all that — and a drummer is bad, too. But the guitar is very sweet, very apologetic, a very nice instrument.

  Howard Hite on Elvis’ First Guitar

  Tupelo Hardware has been a family business for over eighty-five years, owned and managed by three generations of the Booth family. It is well known that ten-year-old Elvis Presley purchased his first guitar here. Current owner, manager and Elvis historian Howard Hite welcomes visitors to the shop at 114 W. Main Street in Tupelo, Mississippi. Store hours are Monday through Friday, at seven thirty a.m. to five thirty p.m. and Saturdays, seven thirty a.m. to twelve thirty p.m.

  People often make their visit first to Elvis’ birthplace before they come here to the Tupelo Hardware store, where Gladys bought her son his first guitar. My wife Julia’s grandfather is George Booth, the original owner of Tupelo Hardware, which opened in 1926.

  Today Tupelo Hardware has anywhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 to 15,000 visitors annually who come from all around the world. Our busiest season is around the time of Elvis’ birthday, January 9th, which turns into something more like Elvis’ month-long birthday — and then during the week of Elvis’ death, in August. At any of these given times, it is not unusual for us to see two to three busloads of tourists parked outside the store.

  We have an unusual mix of products here. Surrounding the original music counter is cast iron and aluminum cookware, spray paint, Briggs-Stratton engines, precision machinist tools, cabinet pulls, plumbing supplies and masonry tools. The company’s present mainstay is their contractor, wholesale and industrial business, but the staff gladly serves anyone in town, including Elvis fans.

  As the story is recorded in a letter dated October 2, 1979, written by Forrest Bobo, a Tupelo Hardware store employee, a young Elvis and his mother, Gladys, visited the store in January 1945 to buy him a birthday gift. According to Bobo, Elvis wanted a rifle but his mother prevailed with the guitar, which he strummed before his mother purchased it for the sum of $7.75 plus two percent sales tax.

  Today we carry a small line of inexpensive imported acoustic guitars in the $79–$100 range that come in different finishes, like black, natural, starburst, red and a blue one, which I call the “Blue Suede Shoes” model. This year, Joe Perry from Aerosmith dropped by to purchase a sunburst acoustic guitar because he said he had to have a guitar from the place where Elvis first got his. Country singer Mel Tillis’ daughter, Pam Tillis, also bought a guitar here recently.

  Unfortunately, I don’t play guitar myself but I have seen Elvis play, first in Hawaii in 1957 and then at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1971 and later in Memphis, at the Coliseum. I love his gospel singing because he sings with a whole lot of soul.

  Many people who stop by here become very emotional. Of course, Elvis’ playing had that effect on people, too. When he opened a concert with something like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” [Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra], you’re just in — the hair just stands up on your arms. He had this effect on nearly everybody.

  In the experience I’ve had in working here, I have seen groups as large as fifty-five to sixty people. One group of tourists from Japan had me tell the story of Elvis’ first guitar through an interpreter. A man in the group asked through the interpreter if he could play one of the guitars and I said yes. He proceeded to sing four Elvis songs that he had memorized, in perfect English.

  One man from New Jersey visited with his wife and their son, who was about six or seven years old. As I was telling him the story, his son walked toward the front door and his father called out to him, “Elvis, get back over here.”

  I also remember a mother and her two daughters visiting from Louisville, Kentucky. They were dressed very fine, as anything I’ve ever seen. When I tell my story, I am often standing behind the original store counter upon the same flooring where Elvis first stood when his mother bought him the guitar. This mother and her daughters were looking around in awe. Before they left, each one of them took their shoes off and stood at the counter barefoot to be able to say they felt right where Elvis had once stood.

  A man and his wife who had dropped by from Brazil — they were both courtroom judges. After I told the story, I saw tears come into this man’s eyes and he asked, “You don’t mind if I give you a hug?” That took me by surprise.

  Scotty Moore

  Scotty Moore is considered the pioneer of rock lead guitar, serving as inspiration for generations to come for his guitar work with Elvis Presley. Moore not only auditioned Elvis for Sun Studios but served as his first guitarist and manager. During this phone interview, to set the scene, Scotty’s hound dog was barking vociferously in the background at a grey squirrel in the backyard of his home in Tennessee. “You’ve spoken to Jimmy Page?” he asked. “I’ll tell you something. He and Jeff Beck — those two boys have more talent in their pinky fingers than anyone else I know.”

  My first guitar was a small Kalamazoo brand acoustic guitar. This was before Gibson bought out the Kalamazoo company. I was about eight years old at the time and one of my brothers, who was fourteen years older, called me up at home in Humbolt, Tennessee, to see if I’d be willing to swap my gui
tar for his beautiful red Gene Autry archtop. He was already married and living in Memphis. I didn’t know anything about guitars. He’d said to me, “I’m fixing to go into the service. How about trading guitars?” Of course now, all these years later, I realize I got the raw end of the deal because his guitar came from a catalog. Then again, my Kalamazoo guitar had seen some rough treatment.

  All three of my older brothers played music when they were home. Dad played the banjo and fiddle, and my oldest brother played mandolin and violin. Together they played at community square dances. I was about ten years old when all my brothers were getting married and leaving the house. I’d thought I completely missed out on something and wanted to play guitar, too.

  My next-door neighbor, James Lewis, was four years older than me and played acoustic guitar. We played together a lot, mostly country music. One man who definitely served as inspiration to me lived about a mile away, and who had a weekend radio show in Jackson, was Oscar Tinsley. He was a fantastic guitarist. I listened mostly to the radio, to a lot of R&B music and country. I can’t remember titles of songs at the moment but it was a battery-operated radio so we did not have it on all the time — we lived on a farm.

  When my dad got up in years, he used to say, “Don’t beat on that thing all day long, now!” I’d taught myself to play entirely by ear so learning and picking up pieces was a challenge. I could work days on a song until I was satisfied with it.

  I quit school in the ninth grade and my dad told me I could work so I stayed on the farm that year. He gave me an acre of cotton, which created the bale that I sold to buy my first jumbo Gibson acoustic. I don’t know what happened to that guitar. Maybe my dad sold it later.