Duffy began visiting every other week, sometimes more often, for five years, to document Vines’ process-and to marvel at the beauty of the guitars. When Duffy first visited Vines, in 2015, Vines was considering quitting his guitar-making work on account of his diminishing eyesight and the swelling and pain in his hands that wouldn’t go away. But otherwise he’s spent his life looking for the wood that will give him the special sound he’s been seeking so long. He also did a little prison time here and there-the longest spell was in the 1960s, for moonshining-and has practiced witchcraft, particularly during the years he lived in rural Louisiana. Somewhere in those early days, perhaps from a guitar played at church, or an animal howling at night outside his window-Vines can’t quite recall-he heard the timbre that he would spend his life trying to elicit from the guitars he builds.įor a period, Vines toured as a guitarist with various artists on the famed Chitlin Circuit, and has played many shows with gospel groups such as the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Vines Sisters. Sometimes he received no wages at all: “You go to the white man and ask for some doggone money, you’d get your head busted open,” Vines recalls in the book. Vines grew up in Greene County, North Carolina, and worked on a plantation under Jim Crow for poverty wages on a good day. “Who they hung, or how many they hung, I don’t know.” “More than one man had been hung on that tree,” Vines writes early in the book. Vines has now turned its wood into four guitars. Perhaps the most notable found wood that Vines has used in his instruments comes from a black walnut “hanging tree” that used to stand a few short miles from Vines' current home. The book is packed with fascinating details about Vines’ idiosyncratic approach to guitar-making, and about his early life in Jim Crow North Carolina, where a legacy of racist violence shaped his view of the world, and continues to exert a deep influence over his guitar designs.Ī photo book showing Freeman Vines' guitars and relaying his life story Buy Duffy’s remarkable photographs take up roughly half of the book, interspersed with detailed storytelling from Van Buren, snippets of conversation between Duffy and Vines and prophetic-sounding soliloquies from the veteran luthier. Now, with coauthor Zoe Van Buren, who serves as folklife director at the North Carolina Arts Council, Vines has released Hanging Tree Guitars, an impressionistic memoir with photographs by Timothy Duffy, founder of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, who spent five years chronicling Vines’ process. “It’s a tone where you become part of the sound-it turns you into a part of the music, like a string vibrating,” he tells me during a Zoom call from his home, which he shares with an unspecified number of dogs and guitars, in eastern North Carolina, the same area where his family has lived ever since they were enslaved. He’s trying to build a guitar with an eerily perfect tone that he first heard as a young man, and which he hasn’t been able to wring out of any of the dozens of guitars he’s crafted. For materials, Vines works with wood salvaged from unlikely places: the soundboard of a discarded piano, the front step of an old tobacco barn, the plank from a mule’s trough. A few of the 78-year-old’s guitars are carved to look like African masks others partake in the famously boxy Bo Diddley style, and others resemble nothing so much as the leaf off a tree, or the flat part of a well-used oar. Freeman Vines has spent almost half a century creating the most distinctive guitars in America.
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