The Authentic

Collings Guitars has just released its Hill Country Line.

An American manufacturer of what has now come to be known not as guitars, but iterations of the ‘North American Guitar’, the name and the guitars themselves have been carefully designed to evoke an idea of an ‘authentic’ America.

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; clog-dancing; 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 some zealots will tell you represent 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 build issues, which I discuss here.

This 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, in other words, it’s going to cost you.

A lot.

This is not a flippant point to make.

Bluegrass music, like Blues, like Folk, was originally the music of the poor and disenfranchised. They didn’t have 8000 pounds to spend on a guitar. Living in shotgun shacks in the mountains of Kentucky and Virginia, scraping a highly dangerous living in mining or logging, with no running water except the creek outside, no electricity or amenities, most of them and their families wouldn’t even make £8000 in their entire lives.

Their instruments were whatever they could lay their hands on. A fiddle brought across from Ireland, or made in the woodshed. A banjo held together with a nail. A washboard. 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. They wouldn’t be changing the strings the Martin recommended every three hours. They’d be playing whatever was on there year in, year out. They made moonshine and drank and sang and danced for the same reason every people going back to Ancient Man has - because life is hard, brutal and often short, so you have to take your pleasures while you can and where you can.

Making music in these circumstances, then, reflects an authentic lived experience - just like Blues or Manouche.

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

It is, at worst and to put it bluntly, cultural appropriation. It’s buying yourself a seat at a table you don’t belong to, so you can say you do. It’s buying a heritage and lineage and a cool and a persona that if you had to actually live it for a day would have you running screaming back to your much more comfortable and much less harsh and unforgiving world.

If you were being generous, you’d say it’s taking someone else’s music and playing it because you love it, because it moves you, and because it speaks to you. And there’s a good case to be made for that. We’ve all done it. But 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 and loved it. Cool has always been a concept in music, 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’ - the inference being that you aren’t ‘cool’ enough to ‘get it’, hep-cat daddio when the reality is you’re more than ‘cool’ enough to ‘get it’: you just don’t like it. And it’s okay to say that about anything. It’s only insecure morons who try and make you feel bad about what you do and don’t like. 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. It happened with Blues. It happened with R n’ B. It happened with Manouche. And it's happened with Bluegrass and Roots. And in one very pertinent sense, if you buy into the idea that music should reflect an authentic lived experience, it means that you’re taking someone else’s music because you aren’t capable of making your own - you aren’t capable of making a music that reflects your lived experience, or don’t want to, because you think that someone else’s is cooler or edgier or more ‘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 …

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.’

The refusal to recognise that is why 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 home.

That isn’t a forever guitar.

That’s giving your children a good start.

That’s not a forever guitar.

That’s as much as a minimum wage to professional worker makes 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 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.

It belongs to those who can afford the price of entry.

Now …

A lot of this is fine. It’s what happened to Jazz - music to bonk to in whorehouses, it became the music the haute monde of New York and London and Paris swung to. 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.

And it’s a nonsense, so you don’t have to buy into it.

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

And people who might look at your instrument and say it’s not authentic are people you can comfortably dismiss as morons.

Because there is no authentic.

Certainly not in terms of kit.

I’ve discussed this before, ad infinitum, 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. 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 the Stones 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 bollocks. 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.