Fronting a country and western band called Bar-X Boys, Jack Linden wants out. The road is a bitch. Bed bugs and Gideon Bibles. Honky-tonks and tricks. He asks a talented kid thirteen years his junior to fill in on guitar for what he hopes will be the band's last hurrah, last tour. Pecos Farley welcomes the opportunity to hear his songs played live and to stretch his songwriting abilities with Jack. He puts his first year of college and girlfriend Ruth on hold. Can Ruth find solace elsewhere? Pecos does have a twin brother, Gila. Sharing lives, beds, and bodies and collaborating on songs, Pecos and Jack find themselves popular on the podunk circuit. Unexpectedly a single song catapults them to the heights of the politically-oriented rock music scene, and they become heroes of the anti-Vietnam war movement as well as rock stars. Pecos, influenced by zealous Students for a Democratic Society, begins thinking like them, spouting their rhetoric. Jack begins to feel he's just along for the ride, a hypnotic with guitar. The relationship is floundering on a more personal level as well, each knowing an inevitable split is coming, neither guessing how final and traumatic it will be.

Guitars inspire cult-like devotion: an aficionado can tell you precisely when and where their favorite instrument was made, the wood it is made from, and that wood’s unique effect on the instrument’s sound. In The Guitar, Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren follow that fascination around the globe as they trace guitars all the way back to the tree. The authors take us to guitar factories, port cities, log booms, remote sawmills, Indigenous lands, and distant rainforests, on a quest for behind-the-scenes stories and insights into how guitars are made, where the much-cherished guitar timbers ultimately come from, and the people and skills that craft those timbers along the way. Gibson and Warren interview hundreds of people to give us a first-hand account of the ins and outs of production methods, timber milling, and forest custodianship in diverse corners of the world, including the Pacific Northwest, Madagascar, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Japan, China, Hawaii, and Australia. They unlock surprising insights into longer arcs of world history: on the human exploitation of nature, colonialism, industrial capitalism, cultural tensions, and seismic upheavals. But the authors also strike a hopeful note, offering a parable of wider resonance—of the incredible but underappreciated skill and care that goes into growing forests and felling trees, milling timber, and making enchanting musical instruments, set against the human tendency to reform our use (and abuse) of natural resources only when it may be too late. The Guitar promises to resonate with anyone who has ever fallen in love with a guitar.

In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the twenty-first century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes. Where the Devil Don’t Stay tells the band’s unlikely story not chronologically but geographically. Seeing the Truckers’ albums as roadmaps through a landscape that is half-real, half-imagined, their fellow Southerner Stephen Deusner travels to the places the band’s members have lived in and written about. Tracking the band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to the author’s hometown in McNairy County, Tennessee, Deusner explores the Truckers’ complex relationship to the South and the issues of class, race, history, and religion that run through their music. Drawing on new interviews with past and present band members, including Jason Isbell, Where the Devil Don’t Stay is more than the story of a great American band; it’s a reflection on the power of music and how it can frame and shape a larger culture.

(Book). Guild guitars have been around since the early 1950s, and by the beginning of the '60s, the company had established a solid reputation for its electric and acoustic archtops, which are still widely regarded today. Despite this enduring popularity, little was known about the history of Guild. The Guild Guitar Book is the result of years of intensive research and countless photo sessions. It includes a thorough history of the company and its guitars, including serial numbers, specifications, original prices, and all the information needed to date Guild guitars. Features hundreds of photos, with a beautiful 40-page color section. Now Back in Print!

Bayou Savage died in 2006. At least that’s how the story played out in the mainstream media. The demented Magi and his evil spirits had been defeated and all portals to the underworld’s inferno slammed shut. The gruesome battle cost Bayou his father and his spirit. After losing the infamous Razor Savage, Bayou needed some rest. Bayou had all he wanted of the talisman, the slimy ghosts, ghouls, goblins and malevolent spirits. The Ghost Defense Institute knew better. The next two hundred years were a frustrating and futile attempt to bring Bayou and the ’53 Fender back to what remained of Bayou’s world. Life had changed after the Religious Wars of 2012. The GDI needed Bayou Savage. The cold, silver and enigmatic cylinder containing Bayou and the guitar kept teams of scientists befuddled and confused for two hundred years. No mortal came close to solving its secret…so far. Steve Johnson’s job is to resurrect Bayou and the guitar…tonight, October 31, 2206… Halloween like you’ve never seen it.

The American guitar, that lightweight wooden box with a long neck, hourglass figure, and six metal strings, has evolved over five hundred years of social turmoil to become a nearly magical object—the most popular musical instrument in the world. In The Guitar and the New World, Joe Gioia offers a many-limbed social history that is as entertaining as it is informative. After uncovering the immigrant experience of his guitar-making Sicilian great uncle, Gioia's investigation stretches from the ancient world to the fateful events of the 1901 Buffalo Pan American Exposition, across Sioux Ghost Dancers and circus Indians, to the lives and works of such celebrated American musicians as Jimmy Rodgers, Charlie Patton, Eddie Lang, and the Carter Family. At the heart of the book's portrait of wanderings and legacies is the proposition that America's idiomatic harmonic forms—mountain music and the blues—share a single root, and that the source of the sad and lonesome sounds central to both is neither Celtic nor African, but truly indigenous—Native American. The case is presented through a wide examination of cultural histories, academic works, and government documents, as well as a close appreciation of recordings made by key rural musicians, black and white, in the 1920s and '30s. The guitar in its many forms has cheered humanity through centuries of upheaval, and The Guitar and the New World offers a new account of this old friend, as well as a transformative look at a hidden chapter of American history.

In the 21st Century, the guitar, as both a material object and tool for artistic expression, continues to be reimagined and reinvented. From simple adaptations or modifications made by performers themselves, to custom-made instruments commissioned to fulfil specific functions, to the mass production of new lines of commercially available instruments, the extant and emergent forms of this much-loved musical instrument vary perhaps more than ever before. As guitars sporting multiple necks, a greater number of strings, and additional frets become increasingly common, so too do those with reduced registers, fewer strings, and fretless fingerboards. Furthermore, as we approach the mark of the first quarter-century, the role of technology in relation to the guitar's protean nature is proving key, from the use of external effects units to synergies with computers and AR headsets. Such wide-ranging evolutions and augmentations of the guitar reflect the advancing creative and expressive needs of the modern guitarist and offer myriad new affordances. 21st Century Guitar examines the diverse physical manifestations of the guitar across the modern performative landscape through a series of essays and interviews. Academics, performers and dual-practitioners provide significant insights into the rich array of guitar-based performance practices emerging and thriving in this century, inviting a reassessment of the guitar's identity, physicality and sound-creating possibilities.