Freeman Vines was chasing a sound.
He couldn’t remember where he had heard it, but it resonated in his mind. His attempts to replicate it in mass-produced guitars were unsuccessful, so Vines took matters into his own hands: in 1958, he began manufacturing guitars.
“I didn’t care what the guitar looked like,” Vines said in a 2020 documentary titled “Hanging Tree Guitars: The Art of Freeman Vines.” “I didn’t care what color the guitar was. She was looking for a tone.”
Vines, now 80, never replicated the sound, but along the way he made dozens of unique guitars, using wood from barns, watering holes and other unexpected—and significant—sources. A series of his guitars featured in a traveling exhibit (currently at the Maria V. Howard Arts Center at the Imperial Center in Rocky Mount, North Carolina) came from wood harvested from a tree that had been used to lynch victims. blacks.
Vines, who now has a store in Fountain, North Carolina, grew up on a nearby plantation during the period of institutionalized discrimination against blacks, working alongside his mother in the fields for paltry wages.
When he got older, he toured a bit as a jazz musician. But the quest to recreate that sound turned out to be the animating force of his life. He carved guitars into different shapes, with specific designs and electronic configurations. Some are made to look like traditional African masks.
“These guitars have a character and a sound all their own,” Vines said in a video accompanying his exhibit. “For someone, it’s just a bit of wood glued together. For me, it’s something else”.
Chris Bergson, a musician and associate professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, said there has been a big jump in independent guitar manufacturing in recent years. “You’ll get something really special and unique, like the opposite of a guitar you buy in a store.”
Vines has multiple myeloma, but he hasn’t slowed down. “Take a nap and keep working, keep creating,” said Timothy Duffyfounder of the Music Maker Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports artists in the southern US and produced the documentary about Vines.
Vines was recently released from a rehab facility after time in a cancer ward. “They really wanted him to stay there,” Duffy recalled. “He said, ‘They say I’m dying, but you could be dead in three minutes.’ I’m living now.’”
The wood used to make the “pitchfork guitars” has a “characteristic of its own,” Vines said. “All that stuff there, people think I carved it and put it there — it wasn’t like that. I was there.
“There are spirits in each of these woods,” Duffy said of the Vines philosophy.
Vines said it’s important to “let the saw do the work” when shaping guitars. “It’s like making biscuits. No two biscuits are alike.
“The wood speaks to me,” Vines is quoted as saying in the book “Hanging Tree Guitars.” “Wood has character.”
JOSHUA NEEDELMAN. THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6759492, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-13 21:50:07
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