The Authentic

Collings Guitars has just released its Hill Country Line.

Once upon a time, this type of instrument would have been called an acoustic guitar. The nerdisation of guitar culture, however, means that a guitar like this is now called a ‘North American Flattop.’ Everything about this rebranding move, like the Hill Country name and the guitars themselves, are carefully calibrated to evoke the idea of an authentic America and an authetic American music.

The Hill Country Line.

We’re supposed to think of Appalachia; of the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia; of mountain folk; of a black-and-white world - in every way from photographs to morals; of moonshine and hoots and clog-dancing; of simple folk playing the songs their ancestors brought over from England and Scotland and Ireland and Wales in the seventeenth and eighteenth century on simple instruments - a fiddle, perhaps the same one Grandpappy’s Grandpappy brought over on the passage; a banjo; a guitar.

We’re supposed to think of an authentic music; an authentic people; an authentic time, an authentic place.

The specs of the guitar reflect this, echoing the formula reached by Martin Guitars in the 1930’s - a formula which a quick look at any forum will tell you represents the ‘authentic’ specs: adirondack spruce; mahogany or rosewood back and sides; ebony fingerboard; scalloped x-bracing; 25.5 inch scale length; 1 3/4 nut width; celluloid pickguard.

It doesn’t matter that Martin arrived at their formula as a consequence of economic imperatives, experimentation, and engineering fixes to previous build issues, which I talk about here.

This, we’re told, is what an acoustic guitar is supposed to be.

If it’s authentic.

The language in the marketing blurb reflects this. It’s larded with words like ‘traditional’, ‘classic’, and ‘original.’

In the UK, a Collings Hill Country Guitar will set you back 8000 pounds.

Give or take a few pounds here or there.

Which means that authenticity comes at a serious price.

If you want to be authentic it’s going to cost you.

A lot.

This is not a flippant point to make because you’re being asked to pay this for ‘authenticity’ when anyone who knows anything about music knows this: you can’t buy authenticity.

You either have it or you don’t.

If you have it, it comes through. Even if you’re late-career Elvis, shoehorned into a bad jumpsuit and wheeled onstage full of uppers, downers and cheeseburgers to slur your way through a terrible set to pay for your carney manager’s gambling debts - it’s there.

If you don’t have it, you can’t buy it.

Ask Vanilla Ice.

Like Blues and Folk, Bluegrass music was originally the music of the poor and disenfranchised. It was authentic precisely because those creating it didn’t know that they were. They didn’t have musical training. They didn’t have conservatoires teaching them about song forms. They just opened their mouths and sang their lives. These people didn’t have £8000 pounds to spend on a guitar. Living in shotgun shacks in the mountains of Kentucky and Virginia, scraping highly dangerous livings in mining or logging, with no running water except the creek outside, and no electricity or amenities, most of them and their families wouldn’t make £8000 in their entire lives.

Their instruments were whatever they could lay their hands on. Perhaps a fiddle brought across from Ireland, or made in the woodshed. A banjo, which is basically a snare drum that you play. They clog-danced because no-one had a drumkit and it was an easy way to keep a beat. If someone had a guitar, it would be bashed and beaten and held together with string and tape if it wasn’t a homemade cigarbox model for slide. It probably wouldn’t be a Martin. It might be a cheap, mass-produced derivative picked up at a county fair. It wouldn’t be kept in a humidor and the strings wouldn’t be changed the Martin recommended every three hours of playing. It would be kept under the bed and the strings would be played until they broke. These people made moonshine and drank and sang and danced for the same reason the Vikings drank mead and told sagas - because life is hard, brutal and often short. You have to take your pleasures where you can, because it’s over quick.

Making music in these circumstances, then, reflects an authentic lived experience.

Reciting this music on an £8000 instrument does not reflect an authentic, lived experience.

This is, at best, a form of cultural homage. At worst, it’s a form of cultural appropriation, buying yourself a seat at a table you don’t belong to so you can say you do.

If we were being generous, we could say it’s taking someone else’s music and playing it because you love it, it moves you, and it speaks to you. And there’s a good case to be made for that. This is how most music forms are perpetuated. It doesn’t always have to be the ‘cool’ stuff; the critically-lauded stuff. As a working musician I’ve played the pop music the critics hate completely unironically and loved it. Cool has always been a concept in music as it has in life, but it’s always been a concept that acts as a gateway: what’s cool and what’s not, or what I listen to is cool and therefore I’m cool by association, but what you listen to isn’t, and therefore you aren’t. Cool is a cultural signifier; and left unchecked it goes all the way to ‘well, you just don’t get it’ - which is an easy way for bad practitioners to justify bad work. You just don’t get it, man …

Unfortunately, these attitudes are prevalent in music and have been forever. One of its most obvious manifestations is when young men (and it is usually young men) adopt someone else’s marginal music as their own and uses it as a signifier of their cool. It happened with Classical. It happened with Jazz in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. It happened with Blues in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. And it’s happened with Bluegrass. What the right equipment and note-perfect renditions of Salt Creek don’t get you, however, is the reflection of the authentic lived experience inherent to the music. Take that to its logical extension and it means that you’re playing someone else’s music because you aren’t capable of making your own: either you aren’t of making a music that reflects your lived experience, or you don’t want to, because your lived experience isn’t particularly noteworthy, edgy, cool or authentic.

Blues came from the field hollers slaves sang to get them through the day.

Manouche came from Roma gypsies in France. Ostracised, shunned by modern society, discriminated against, it became cool when Django fused it with Jazz and created a hot, authentic sound.

Now, to play Blues, you need a VOS Gibson Les Paul, and VOS handwired amp. And you need to play it like this …

Now, to play Manouche, you need a Selmer-Maccaferri guitar, and you need to hold your pick like this, and learn to play Nuages or Swing 42 like this …

If you want music that reflects your lived experience, then make it. Write about editing your videos for Youtube; write about analytics; write about the difficulty of finding a Soy Latte in Glasgow or Des Moines or wherever. Write about your student debt; the collapse of the music industry; the ubiquity of platforms; that friend of yours who won’t grow up; that great night that you plastered all over Instagram; the Teams Meeting where you talked for an hour with your microphone on mute and no-one told you …

Don’t write about lonely roads and railway brakemen and coalminers. Don’t write about something you’ve never been or done in a music form that prides itself on authenticity and representing the ‘real.’

Represent your real.

The refusal to do that is one of the reasons guitar music is in crisis.

It’s in crisis because people think that you need an £8000 authentic guitar to make music on.

It’s in crisis because what were living, reflective musics have become the cultural preserves of serious young men who unselfconsciously call themselves things like ‘Critter’ and ‘Bubba’ without apparent irony and wear very expensive dime-store clothing and have very expensive Depression-era haircuts while treating every Norman Blake or Tony Rice lick like it’s Holy Writ. They talk about ‘forever’ guitars, like 1937 Martin D-28’s, and endlessly debate subtle differences in tone in instruments while completely and utterly failing to get that any audience outside of guitar nerds simply don’t care.

A guitar always sounds like a guitar to the 99.9% of the audience who actually matter.

A 1937 Martin D-28 will set you back somewhere between $70,000 and $250,000 dollars.

While that indicates that there’s obviously money somewhere in being a serious young man, that’s not a forever guitar.

That’s a house.

That isn’t a forever guitar.

That’s paying your children through university.

That’s not a forever guitar.

That’s as much the nurse who will save your life when you choke on your Soy Latte will make in a decade.

For an instrument that became popular because it was cheap and easy to make music on.

£8000 for a guitar that’s ‘authentic’ on which to pay the ‘authentic’ music of poor people on.

$250,000 for a ‘forever’ guitar.

Let me repeat. Guitars became popular because they were cheap to make, cheap to buy, easy to get a couple of chords down on, and easy to make music on. They aren’t Stradivari. They aren’t Steinways. They’ll never be heirloom instruments except for trainspotting nerds in the same way those instruments are.

£8000.

$250,000.

That’s a high price ticket to enter a world to enjoy a music that was written by working people for working people.

It’s a price that’s put on it to keep the poor, working person out, to be honest - because their music now doesn’t belong to them. They aren’t listening to it anyway. They’re listening to electro-pop and Spotify playlists.

It makes the music belong to those who can afford the price of entry.

Now …

A lot of this is fine. It’s what happened to Jazz - music to keep people dancing and happy in bordellos became the music of the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s, and then became the preserve of white intellectuals. It’s what happens to every music made by the marginals of society. Blues, rock n’ roll, pop, hip-hop, rap, acid house, rave and indie.

But it’s a nonsense.

You don’t have to spend 8k on a guitar to play music you like.

People might then look at your instrument and say it’s not authentic.

That’s fine.

You can comfortably dismiss those people as morons.

Do you want to know why Billy Strings is so cool?

I mean, besides the fact he’s a great player who writes great songs that his audience can see themselves in.

Besides that.

Because he’ll take a vintage ‘authentic’ pre-war Martin acoustic guitar …

… and he’ll drill a hole in it because he wants to install a pick-up in it.

Everyone else swallows their tongue.

He does it because he needs to so that he can play the music he wants to play on the damned thing.

That’s authentic.

Because you can’t buy authentic.

Certainly not in terms of kit.

I’ve discussed this before, just as I’ve discussed the vagaries and wonders and idiocies of guitar culture from the perspective of a musician who is, fundamentally, a guitarist. Music is sold on genres and scenes and cliques and cool and on ideas of authenticity that simply don’t hold water once you start looking into them. Bob Dylan didn’t travel the railroads looking for songs and he wasn’t taught guitar by an old Bluesman called Wigglefoot. He was a fairly normal completely uncool kid who made all of that stuff up to make himself look cool. To look ‘authentic’ in other words. Bruce Springsteen never chopped a log in the Adirondacks, pulled a shift in a steelworks or fixed a Chevy as a greasemonkey in his life. He made it up in his persona and his music - because it made him look ‘authentic.’ The Rolling Stones were never bad boy outlaws. They were middle-class and educated when they were in their boy-band iteration; and millionaire pop stars when they were in their 'serious’ artists / outlaw phase. It’s all marketing, hype and myth-making. Springsteen and the rest of the still surviving class of the sixties still going out at £250 a ticket for the cheap seats aren’t your mates, they don’t reflect your life, they aren’t singing your blues.

They’re keeping going because that’s what they’ve always done if there’s someone prepared to pay for it. Hackney Diamonds was actually a great album - in the age of streaming. But no-one listened to it past the first week in the way that a generation wore out the grooves on Exile on Main Street, and they aren’t going to play any of it in concert - a concert that’s now happening without Charlie and without Bill and with an arsenal of paid back-up players.

You can buy the kit.

You can learn the licks.

You can drill the exercises.

You can get the right haircut.

You can buy the right clothes.

All good things.

But music is in all of us.

All you have to do is sing out, and mean it.

And it’s authentic.

And here’s the thing.

All the musical stuff those serious young men and women venerate and treat like Scripture?

They were all marginal musics.

They were all deeply uncool musics.

They were all creative arts made and done by people on the fringes of society; they were all things that society initially rejected, because they didn’t fit the narratives the gatekeepers promoted at the time; and they all became popular because other people who were marginalised, unheard, ignored and different heard something of themselves in there.

You can make music like everyone else.

Or you can sing your song and stand by it.

And you don’t need an £8000 guitar to do that.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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The Origin(al) Stories Journal was launched to track the writing and recording of the Northumbria album. You can read about the thought processes behind decision here. It has continued as a collection of posts drawn from my personal diaries, project journals, and process notes. Showing how I’ve found a path to doing something, often via experimentation, missteps, false trails and blind alleys, these posts do not offer definitive insights into any of the projects on The Landing Stage. They are just postcards from the ongoing journey.

Have a great day, be a positive force, and tell those you love that you love them.