I play a 1938 Recording King M5 archtop guitar. I’m fond of this guitar, though I’m not always sure I like the way it sounds. I sometimes yearn for a Martin or Taylor flattop, but I have a loyalty to the Recording King that arises from its history. 

Much of that history predates me. Recording King guitars were made by Gibson specifically for mail-order through Montgomery Ward. I picture a boy receiving the package on a cold Midwestern day, a warm farmhouse day with dried cornstalk stubble in the fields. His emotions upon seeing the guitar for the first time must have been much different from my own. The Carter Family were playing on border radio that year, and the boy would tentatively strum along with “Foggy Mountain Top,” his new M5 close enough to Maybelle Carter’s Gibson L-5 to complete the fantasy. 

It could have been a girl, but that would complicate my history. It wasn’t a young girl’s guitar, definitely not a woman’s. It still carries the personality of a certain type of boy. The rough habits, carelessness, and idle disrespect of a boy. A boy who would grow into a young man wearing pearl-buttoned shirts and cowboy boots. 

That was many years before I came along with my own musical fantasies. In those days I lugged my new Alvarez dreadnaught down to group lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, where fifteen or twenty of us tried to follow a big guy named Ray Tate through songs like “Strewball” and “The Drunken Sailor” while dreaming of—in my case—the likes of Jimmy Page. 

I was keeping up with my comrades, I think. I knew my chords, the easy ones anyway, but I never quite learned what to do with them. Before I got that far somebody broke into my apartment and stole the guitar.

I went looking for a replacement. I had no money, so with a romantic notion of “vintage” in mind, I drove a long way to a far suburb to look at what was advertised simply as “three old guitars.” I think I pictured something like Ray’s ’40s-era Martin, but what I found were three sad old archtop guitars, the kind with the violin-style f-holes. The two that were in decent shape were Kays. The other had no name and was beat to hell. The frets were worn down, the fingerboard all scalloped out, and the body was painted with brown house paint. At $100 it was ten dollars more than either of the Kays, but next to them it looked graceful, even in its degraded state, like a deposed queen living in squalor. That’s the one I bought, the battered mystery. I would not know what it actually was for probably 30 years. 

I began refurbishing the guitar. I fixed the fretboard with epoxy and rosewood dust, and stripped off the house paint. Naked, the body revealed random patterns where my imagined musician had pecked at the guitar with a pocket knife. Swirls, mostly, but in one place I could clearly read “Chet A.” A clue to the music he played: country music, cowboy music. Another clue was the two Bondo-filled holes near the bridge—where a pickup might go. Loud, driving country music, a hillbilly band. 

I dug out all the Bondo, backed with wadded newspaper in one of the bigger holes, and fixed those with pieces of spruce. Then I ran out of steam. There was some bad business going on inside, and I didn’t have the energy or confidence to start taking the thing apart. I laid it in an old case I found for $25 and put the case in the closet—and that was the end of my guitar playing. The closets changed as I moved around—Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle—but I never got rid of the guitar. I always thought that someday I would finish what I started.

A couple of decades later I picked up a guitar somewhere and played a C chord. I strummed it once awkwardly and didn’t know what else to do with it, so I put the guitar down. Some years after that I took my fixer-upper out of the closet and tried to tune it, but the tuning knobs crumbled. I replaced those and the tailpiece, which was cracked, and put the guitar back in the closet. More years passed, then I bought a wall hook and hung the guitar beside my desk. I was gathering the will to start playing again. Finally, in the spring of 2010, I decided, “I’m going to learn music now.” 

About a week into my new mission I realized that the guitar would have to be repaired. I called around. The first guy was a respected archtop expert. He said he didn’t think the job would “pencil out,” so I took the guitar to another shop, Sound Guitar Repair in Fremont, where they agreed work on it. The guitar looked like it had been dropped, because there was a large contusion on the side under the lower bout, but the main problem was that at some point long, long ago someone spilled some sort of liquid into the inside. I maintain that it was beer and I blame drunken cowboys in a Texas roadhouse, perhaps the event that began the guitar’s decline, or perhaps just another in a long line of insults. At any rate, every brace in the guitar had either fractured or come loose. 

Cat Fox, who owns the shop, was busy with other repairs, and she had the guitar from June till, I think, November. At some point I had to retrieve the disassembled guitar and clean mold out of the belly before she would continue. In pieces, it seemed so fragile and insubstantial that I wondered if it was worth it. 

Objectively, it probably wasn’t, but by then I had an emotional attachment. I refinished the guitar myself and saved $400, but I could have bought a nice new Taylor for what the repairs cost me. I don’t regret it. After all those years in my closet, it almost demanded that I restore it. Before Cat put the back on, I signed the inside, memorializing its repair and rebirth. 

What would that original owner think of his 1938 Recording King’s new life? I play it nearly every day and treat it well. I’ve written nearly 40 songs on it, which I perform at open mics around the area. The guitar’s stark tone and strange geometry have undoubtedly affected my style. I am not now and never have been a fan of country music, but when I talk to Wendy about my songs, she says, “Yeah, you’ve got a bit of country in you.”