My old guitar sits in the stand in the corner of my office.      

It’s quiet now, but in the past the old guitar rang with music every day of my life.  Yes, it looks like just a music instrument I know, but, to me it has always been my best friend.

 My first guitar was purchased at Ike Martin’s Music Store in Springfield, Missouri in 1948.  In three weeks I could play “Wildwood Flower” just like Mother Maybelle Carter….well, at least that is what I believed so I’m sticking with it.  Me and the old guitar learned to make music together, me singing and learning where to put my fingers and strumming in actual rhythm just like the big guys, my old guitar patiently putting up with my fumbling and wrong notes cause it knew I had to get better or die trying.  Luckily, I got better.    

All through High School at Pleasant Hope High, Pleasant Hope, Missouri,1950-1954, my old guitar hardly left my side.  I would play it until I fell asleep in the evening and then lay it on the bed in the upstairs attic that was my room in the farm house in the Ozarks, radio tuned to 50,000 watt clear channel WSM in Nashville, or 250,000 watt XERF, Del Rio, Texas (although the station was physically located across the river in Mexico to get around the watt limit in the US) and kept it on all night with snatches of sleep then awakening to more country music, screaming radio evangelists,  ads to sell all kinds of crazy cure-alls, buy your baby chicks, buy your favorite 78 rpm records (that almost always arrived in the mail cracked or broken in pieces) or buy books on how to play the harmonica and make it sound just like a steam  locomotive and song books from every major or minor country music artist in the world.  So, to say that I slept with my guitar would not be quite right….however, I did keep it in the bed with me at all times. 

 My old guitar became my tool for entertainment when I started dating in High School.  I kept it in the back seat, body of the guitar sitting on the floor boards back behind my seat in the ’48 Chevy, candy apple red, split manifold, twin piped, moon hubcapped dream car that I had worked all summer in the hot hay fields to earn money to buy.  We used to park on the gravel bar of the Sac River just a few miles out of Pleasant Hope and I would reach around and pull out the old guitar and make music for the rest of the evening.  The girls were mostly quiet during these impromptu serenades, probably cause singing Roy Acuff’s “Wreck On The Highway” at the top of my voice while flailing away on the old guitar wasn’t their idea of a romantic evening in the moonlight.  Most of the girls had seen one too many California beach movies where the hero was singing pop or early rock and roll and it’s kinda hard to recreate that atmosphere on an Ozark gravel bar.  But, I did my dangedest.  Singing hillbilly music in the 50’s was not that cool it seems. 

 My old guitar joined the Navy with me in 1954 and we both went off to boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center.  I was 18 and off on my adventures to see the world and try to claim at least part of it for my own.  After boot camp my  old guitar and I  reported aboard the USS BRYCE CANYON (AD-36) in Mare Island, California.  We were both pretty good sailors and played music every night on board ship with other members of the crew.  The old guitar and I got to enjoy two trips to the Far East, stopping in the Philippines, Japan, Okinawa, Guam, Hong Kong, and every place in between.  In Honolulu I actually got to play the old guitar on that beautiful Waikiki Beach, just like in the old beach movies but the Pleasant Hope girls were long gone with other guys and never knew it.

 In 1959, just a year after we got back from our time in the Navy, the old guitar helped start The Good Samaritan Boys Ranch as we played and sang on local radio in a 150 mile radius of Brighton, Missouri,  while my Uncle Bob Johnson preached and told about the Ranch and the work with homeless boys, encouraging folks to send in money, farm produce or other items to help with the work and to feed the boys. Fresh home grown farm produce and meat came in from the rural Ozark area more than money cause most folks in the Ozarks didn’t have anything else and it sure tasted fine.

 In 1962 my old guitar and I moved to Nashville with a recording contract with Columbia Records Epic label.  The faithful friend traveled the country and beyond with me, staying in tune, never too tired to do another song, strapped around my neck and shoulders as a comfort and companion, sleeping in its padded case in the back of all the different cars, motor homes  and tour buses as I, or one of my musicians,  drove to the next town on the tour, ever ready to be unpacked and play again when we arrived.

 Through the years spanning 1959 to 2009, fifty years of music life, the old guitar has lent itself to the precious hands of so many of my heroes as we would visit backstage in dreary, dirty, drafty dressing rooms, during our road tours.  Red Foley, Ernest Tubb, Little Jimmy Dickens or George Jones would say, “Stan, let me see your old guitar a minute”, and would gently cradle it to their bodies as their hands would pick out a song that was on their minds at the time.  Maybe it was a new song they had just written, like with Mickey Newbury, Roger Miller, Wayne Carson, Red Lane or Lefty Frizzell, and the old guitar just soaked up the creative energy from those fingers like water to a thirsty throat of a hot hay field worker.  Those precious finger imprints are still on the fret board, I can almost feel them.    Or like the time at the early tv station in the sixties when Merle Travis picked up my old guitar and did “Nine Pound Hammer” as only that master picker could do, or Cal Smith played it back in the dressing room on one of my old tv shows and sang one of his favorite Ernest Tubb songs then followed that with "Country Bumpkin" before it was even released to the public to become the monster hit.  In 1966 Paul Yandell  took the old guitar and showed me his guitar intro on “Break My Mind” that he played on George Hamilton IV record.  In 1986 Buck Owens picking up the old guitar to show me the licks that he played on Tommy Collins hit record of “High On A Hilltop” in the early 50’s when Buck was still a musician doing sessions, and before he became a star.  Keith Whitley came to my office in the early days of CMT and picked up the old guitar and did a favorite Lefty Frizzell song, “ I Never Go Around Mirrors" that he had just recorded.   Years before, in my Hotel room in Atlanta while on tour, Lefty Frizzell came to my room after the show and sitting in the straight back chair by the writing table he picked up my old guitar and sang that same song that he and Whitey Shaffer had just written.  I still get chill bumps thinking about that.  I know those finger prints are still there, warm and real on the smooth wood of the guitar neck.  Jerry Jeff Walker played the old guitar and sang his song, "Mister Bojangles" and told me how he came to write it, at 18 years of age, when he was in jail in New Orleans with the old black street dancer for being drunk and disorderly and later realized that that old man would be a great character for a song.  Yeah, I reckon so.   Those are all magic times for me, shared with the old guitar.

The old guitar got me through many a lonely night in some Hotel room when the crowds had gone home and the entertainers were left alone in another strange town.  Those early morning alone times were when the songs were written, when the thoughts would become words and the tune would flood your mind and come out in your fingers on the guitar, just as if the melody lived in the old guitar and was waiting for you to bring it out.  These all alone times, coming down from the performance high, were only made bearable by the music and the comfort of the old guitar.  

 Years have passed since I nestled the body and neck of the old guitar into the guitar stand in the corner of my office, no longer a performer but still connected at the heart.  It stands there as a symbol of my lifetime spent with music, over 60 years since the journey started at the counter of Ike Martin's Music Store in Springfield, Missouri.  Mr. Martin took down the guitar from its slot among the many guitars along the wall and said, "Here you are, son, take good care of it and it should last you a long time."  Well, at 12 years old I had no idea just how long that time would be, but looking back now it seems pretty clear, I wasn't taking care of it......the old guitar was taking care of me.  

Stan