Chestnut guitar for Chan Marshall

A favorite guitar from a couple years ago built for Chan Marshall who records as Cat Power. A youtube vid of the guitar in action here. On tour for "The Greatest" her famous black Danelectro was accidentally knocked over by a live sound engineer and the headstock cracked. A few months (weeks?? I dunno) before the Danelectro was busted, I dropped in at the Mercer Hotel in New York where Chan was dazzling the press corps. I brought along a guitar for her consideration but she wasn't too keen on its old Mustang neck and said she would much prefer a Silvertone neck. She had her Danelectro with her which I had the great pleasure of strumming a few chords on. Die Zauberflote! I thought, as it was Dreadnought-loud played unplugged! Very pleased to have one of my guitars in the mix but have fingers crossed for a rebirth of Chan's Danelectro.

The follow-up guitar, as it were, arrived a month or two later after I was able to hunt down a Silvertone neck which I'll guess to be a '59 or '60. As with Fender necks, Chan has an allergy for switches on guitars. So the two, early 60s, neck and middle position, lipstick tube pickups are wired with just a volume knob and no three way toggle. The original 250K potentiometer was later replaced with a 100K volume knob to remove some of the twang that you'll hear in the youtube video.

The body is made of wormy Chestnut and is light as a feather. Guitar has the feel of playing a cloud. The lumber had a former life as a bookshelf in the home of poets Jonathan Williams and Thomas Meyer in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina. The shelf was removed many years ago to reclaim some wall space for Williams' collection of modernist photography and am trying to remember what books were once shelved there. I have a dim memory of R.H. Blyth's four-part Haiku series, Aperture's Masters of Photography Series, Stephen King and Peter Straub first editions, others.

Finished guitar was delivered in a brown shopping bag from APC following the inspiration of seeing a photograph of The Ramones with Joey Ramone's Mosrite in a shopping bag in lieu of a case. Band looking sharp on the G train probably headed into the city for a gig at CBGB's. Transfer at Queens Plaza for the R train into Manhattan??