Guitar

An American Life

By: Tim Brookes

Narrated by: Tim Brookes

What was it about a small, humble folk instrument that allowed it to become an American icon? The guitar represents freedom, the open road, protest and rebellion, the blues, youth, lost love, and sexuality. Tim Brookes explores with adoration these ideas and how they became entwined with the history of America.

Shortly before Tim Brookes' 50th birthday, baggage handlers destroyed his guitar, his 22-year-old traveling companion. His wife promised to replace it with the guitar of his dreams, but Tim discovered that a dream guitar is built, not bought. He set out to find someone to make him the perfect guitar, a quest that ended up a on a dirt road in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where an amiable curmudgeon master guitarmaker, Rick Davis, took a rare piece of cherry wood and went to work with saws and rasps.

Meanwhile, Tim set out to write a kind of chronicle of the guitar, as he said, "not a catalog of makes and models, nor a genealogy of celebrities, but an attempt to understand this curious relationship between the instrument and the people involved with it, and how that has grown and changed over time".

He discovered that the instrument, first arriving with conquistadors and the colonists, ended up in the hands of a variety of people: miners and society ladies, lumberjacks and presidents' wives, Hawaiians, African-Americans, Cajuns, jazz players, spiritualists, singing cowboys of the silver screen, and bluegrass and Beatles fans. Inventors and crackpots tinkered with it. In time, it became America's instrument, its soundtrack.

When Tim wasn't breathing over Rick's shoulder, he was trying to unravel the symbolic associations a guitar holds for so many of us, musicians and non-musicians alike. His journey takes him across the country talking to historians, curators, and guitarmakers.

©2005 Tim Brookes (P)2005 Blackstone Audiobooks

Held my interest

through all 11 hours. I loved the final sentence!
This audio deserves a second listen!

very poetic

great overview of the history of the guitar. great insight of the ways and lifestyle of guitar players. I truly enjoyed this book.

A masterpiece!

Any additional comments?

This book is a lovely combination of music history, a wry look at American culture, and the story of how a master craftsman builds a fine instrument. It's all told with a clever narrative structure and a British sense of humor.
Want to know how a Conederate warship's sinking of a whaling ship near Hawaii led to the rise of blues guitar? This is the place. Want to know the difference between the finish on your guitar and a Stradavarius violin, and why one has cat pee in it? Read this book.
The author reads this book like he's sitting in your living room telling the story over a few beers. I want to meet him and see his new guitar.
I liked this so much I'm going to listen to it again.

Highly enjoyable

If you are even mildly interested in the guitar or the history of guitar related music in the US, you owe it to yourself to listen to this book. I'm a bit of a guitar freak even though I can barely play. I enjoyed every minute of it and was legitimately sad to see the time remaining count down on my iPod. Highly recommended.

A Worthy Read

it's not often that a nonfiction book truly captures your attention. However, for anyone interested in the history of guitars this book is a treasure.