Katherine is injured again. Broken neck.
Once again I’ll loosen her strings and pack her gently away for a trip back east, to the Ovation guitar factory in Connecticut, where I’m hoping her 32-year old warranty will cover the cost of a neck re-set.
I noticed this most recent injury one Sunday evening at a bluegrass Christmas sing at my church. I was with the amazing Karla and her amazing upright bass; her fiancé Jimmy, a man who never met a stringed instrument he couldn’t spin into gold; Mark, a brilliant banjo player who spent the evening playing brilliant mandolin; his wife Mary, who harmonizes with him in music and in life; and my pal Eric, a guitar strummer who also happens to be the pastor at my church.
We were trying our best to bend traditional Christmas songs into bluegrass rhythms. I was about to launch into an up-tempo version of “Away in a Manger,” swinging that lovely sweet lullaby like a cradle in a mountain storm, when I noticed that Katherine’s action was quite a bit higher than usual. I was having to push down hard on the strings, like I used to on the Sears and Roebuck special I learned to play on after my mom bought it during a Loretta Lynn phase when I was a teenager.
Katherine’s strings usually lay close to her long, slim, smooth neck, so I knew something was amiss. Sure enough, on closer inspection I noticed that the neck of the guitar was coming loose where it attaches to the space-age fiberglass body that fuels the Martin lovers of the world to smug superiority.
At this point, I should stop to clear up a misconception.
You think I play bluegrass.
Nope.
I can play just barely enough guitar to accompany myself on the folksongs I’ve written off and on for the past 35 or so years. I have never actually been a guitar player. I am more of a guy who sings little songs and, oh yeah, plays a little guitar so my voice isn’t out there on the edge of the cliff all by itself.
I never really listened to bluegrass all that much, the way I’m sure Karla and Jimmy and Mark must have. My people back in Pennsylvania were big country music fans when I was a kid, though. While I pretended to hate it when I was a long-haired rock and roller, it still seeped into the ground around the roots I was growing. My mom’s favorites were Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, George Jones and Loretta Lynn, and I knew most of their songs whether I wanted to or not.
But above them all, my mom loved Johnny Cash. She loved him five feet high and risin’, and she used to sing “Don’t take your guns to town, Bill,” to me when I was a little boy.
So, by the time my beloved Beatles covered a Buck Owens song on Ed Sullivan, and Bob Dylan cryptically let it be known how much he admired Johnny Cash, their music was part of me. I went deep into Hank Williams on my own, and found him to be possibly the best American folksong writer ever.
And when I decided to trade the drums for a guitar, quit trying to copy the Beatles and start copying John Prine instead, it was natural for me to incorporate country music into my – you should pardon the expression – style.
But I never played bluegrass. Really learned to admire the pickers who could. Used to love the theme song to “The Beverly Hillbillies.” But I couldn’t play it. Didn’t have the karate chops, as Jethro would say.
It was at Hallmark that I heard about the Thursday bluegrass lunch sessions. A bunch of card-producin’ pickers gets together once a week to play for an hour, outside in the summer, indoors when the weather turns and fingers go numb. They love the music, and they come together to love it as a group. I go along sometimes, and strum G, C and D. I will sometimes sing what I think are harmonies. Occasionally I’m right.
In the wide open, porch floor shakin’ good time way of the purveyors of sweet bluegrass jam, they welcome me. Nobody cares that I don’t take flat-picking breaks. My picks are just as flat as anybody else’s, but that’s where the similarity between me and an actual bluegrass flat-picker ends.
Where was I?
Oh yeah. Katherine.
I picked her smooth, blond body from a row of new guitars in a little music shop in Corning, New York, in the fall of 1973. I had been singing at colleges and coffeehouses and bars for a couple of years and, while I loved my black Harmony Sovereign, I knew it was time to upgrade. I wanted an acoustic guitar I could plug into an amp, and the Ovation was perfect.
Plus, I could picture myself pausing between songs to balance her on her bottom and say to the few who weren’t drunk, ignoring me, or both, “Look. Finally got a standing Ovation.”
So I bought her – around $300, I think – took her home and named her after Katherine Hepburn.
We’ve been thought some stuff, Katherine and I.
Our first regular gigs were at Wet Goods, a college-town beer and wine bar, also in Corning, New York. It was there that her wood first soaked in the cigarette smoke that filled the bar like Blue Ridge Mountain fog. I played four hours on the nights I sang there, and it used up every song I knew, and several I only sort-of knew. Between sets I went from table to table with a basket and an embarrassed grin, and the kids at those tables stopped drinking and flirting just long enough to drop in some loose change. My pay for those four hours ranged from a high of 50 bucks on blessed nights, to a low of less than 10 many other nights.
When I started Cornell, I was stunned at how hard the schoolwork was. It seemed like between my studies, my job in the library and my folk-singing gigs at bars and fraternity houses, I could barely keep up. I decided that the only way I could hope to get through with my spirit intact was to take on a major personal project that would be hard and take a lot of time. So Katherine and I wrote a series of songs about the life of Christ from the Book of Matthew. Eventually we went from church to church performing it for congregations who wondered when I was going to finish so they could get home and start the meatloaf.
I also played guitar at a house church where the preacher’s name – Jack Parr and I kid you not – was Noah. It was there that one of the little kids ran into my guitar as it leaned against a wall. The guitar fell to the floor with the sick ring of a crash test dummy flying through a windshield.
Katherine was fine. It wasn’t the last time she fell.
One night I sang at a bar in Washington, D.C., where I lived for three years after college. I was at a place called Rocky Raccoon’s in Georgetown, where I sang sometimes as an opening act. I opened the guitar case and, to my horror, the lid fell right off. I managed to jerry-rig it back together. Turned out it was an omen. While I was singing, the buttonhole on my guitar strap came undone, and the guitar crashed to the wooden stage.
And again, she was OK. Katherine is nothing if not sturdy.
She’s been tossed not-so-gently into vans, Jeeps, buses, trucks and planes. Her neck has run into microphone stands, doorjambs and walls. We’ve played together in muddy fields, in the rain, in rooms full of rowdy drunk frat boys and their equally drunken dates, and on the front steps of the Community of Hope Church of the Nazarene in the heart of Washington D.C.’s inner-city.
Indeed, it was the guitar that helped me feel like I belonged at Community of Hope.
As a child of the sixties, I was cursed with a brand of racism unique to my generation. I felt that black people had been so abused by white people for so long in America that they must be angry about it. So I figured their natural tendency would be to get even with white society, and me in particular. I know I would have felt that way.
I couldn’t imagine that the folks trying to survive on Belmont Street would want me around. It was on that street that Community of Hope was located, in a crumbling, mostly-abandoned apartment building that was slowly being rehabilitated.
The first time some friends took me to church there, I swore I would never go back.
The second time I went, somebody told them I was a struggling folk-singer. OK, so it was me who told them.
The third time I went I stood in front of the small congregation that was about equally divided between black folks from the neighborhood, and white folks from the suburbs.
I stared down at Katherine, and wondered what in the world we were doing there.
I rang a G chord, and began to sing a country song called “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor.” By the first, “Jesus gained a soul and Satan lost a good right arm,” everything was all right. They were nodding, smiling, clapping, accepting.
I attended church and sang songs there for the rest of the time I lived in Washington.
Like most ladies with long and interesting lives, Katherine shows some signs of her years.
I was playing her one night on a sofa in our former house, right after we got JJ, our Labrador retriever pup. I was really caught up in a song I was trying to write, so it wasn’t until I paused that I noticed that JJ had been happily gnawing away on the end of my guitar at the tip of the neck, where the tuning pegs are. It’s been chewed up ever since. There is also an inch-long gash of unremembered origin on the body, deep enough to stand a guitar pick on edge. A protective strip of rubber on the back of the body to protect against belt buckle scratches has long since disappeared.
So, after all that, her worst injury to date occurred while she was sleeping. I’d been away on vacation a week or so, and when I opened the case, I saw that the tension of the strings had ripped the bridge – the part where the bottom ends of the strings attach to the front of the guitar – off the body. A section of the top of the guitar had peeled back like warped linoleum.
I felt like I’d been kicked. Panic took me, and I looked away to keep from being sick.
For the first time in over 20 years, my guitar was unplayable.
I was happy to learn that they weren’t kidding when they said “Lifetime Warranty.” Katherine came back after a month as good as new.
A few years ago I was fortunate enough to get a sabbatical grant from my employers at Hallmark. I used the time to write a book of essays about turning 50. I finished the project with a public reading, during which I played a few original songs. One of the pieces I wrote spoke of “the guitar I’ve owned for more than 25 years.”
The reading/singing went OK, and I was driving home afterwards with my head still back there on stage, listening to applause. My cell phone rang. It was my wife.
“Bill, where’s your guitar?”
“What do you mean? It’s in the back seat.”
“Better take a look.”
I had also been thinking about the performance when I loaded the Jeep to come home. I had driven away and left my guitar sitting right in the middle of the Hallmark parking garage.
I sank into the Jeep seat. So this was how it would end for Katherine and me. I hoped that some guitar lover had stolen her, and that she hadn’t been run down and shattered by some well-meaning Hallmarker who was just antsy to get home.
“Somebody named Oliver called from Hallmark,” my wife continued. “He found it and put it in your booth.”
Oliver is the artist who signs his artwork “Revilo.” He loves good music, and has loaned me some incredible stuff to listen to over the years. He and his wife Sylvia – a Hallmark writer – saw my guitar abandoned in the middle of the garage, and saved her and my butt at the same time.
And now, the broken neck.
After more than 30 years of faithful service, I suppose I could just let Katherine retire. I could put her away safe and snug in the case, until the day I hand her down to my son.
But there are nights. There are nights when I sit alone on the couch down in the Beatle Room and hold that guitar in my lap, and when I wrap my hand around the neck and feel my fingers on the strings, everything is exactly right, and the world is as it should be but too often isn’t.
One day I will put Katherine away, and go buy a fancy new guitar to replace her.
One day.
But not yet, old girl. Not yet.
