Down Home: Listen to Dalton Roberts' podcast about what he learned from Bill Brock.
"Epi" is my favorite guitar. She is a 1947 Epiphone, made by Gibson, and I have played her for a half century.
She has lived a hard life. She's played everything from the roughest honky-tonks to the original American folk festival at Lowell, Mass., to the Grand Ole Opry. Somehow, she just keeps sounding more divine every year, like an old saint of God gets mellower and sweeter with the passing of her years.
She was stolen one time. A club owner I was playing for sneaked out and broke the window of my car and took her. It's a miracle that I got her back. Redbird Clingan remembered some ink stains on her from a time when I was using her for a desk to write a song. Many years later he saw her on the back seat of the man's car parked on Market Street in front of a pawn shop and got the man's license number.
I took a Catoosa County deputy and went to his trailer and got her. I told him, "You can steal my girlfriend and I might let you live, but if you steal my guitar your life is in danger."
The idiot had left her in the sun until she got sunburned. Her pretty mahogany finish was freckled and speckled and is to this day. The heat had warped her neck, and I had to get a guitar chiropractor to adjust her.
Yes, she has lived hard. I accidentally broke her neck years later. I was playing a songwriter's showcase with Roger Alan Wade and leaned her up for just a moment. She fell, and it broke her neck. I cried. Tom Morgan, of the legendary Morgans of Dayton Mountain, restored her completely.
I guessed her wood is getting dryer and the bracing inside may be loosening, so I was ready to buy a back-up for her when my picking pal, Tony Smalley, e-mailed me that he had seen a guitar exactly like Epi at Picker's Exchange. I dashed over there and, sure enough, there was Epi's gorgeous sister, Epi II, waiting for me with a smile. If there is any difference in the tones of the two guitars, my ear is not sharp enough to hear it. I took her home, and with the help of Donnie Jenkins, she and Epi made sweet music for a while.
As you get older, you start thinking of some special things to leave your children. Not necessarily things of great financial value but things close to your heart.
My son, Jeff, has been financially more successful than I ever was and is a fine picker, so my guitar was the main thing I wanted to leave him. As Epi got more fragile through the years I feared she might lay down before I went "the way of the buffalo," to steal a poignant old Indian phrase.
I hope he will keep Epi no matter what the years do to her, because she will sound good to the end and she embodies a million memories. But now, if she dies, she can die in peace knowing that Epi II will be making her kind of music for many decades to come.
I do know one thing: Nothing excites an old man like a young woman or a new guitar.
E-mail Dalton Roberts at DownhomeP@aol.com