Nobody Wanted His Handmade Guitars — Then John Denver Played One and Everything Changed D

John Denver climbed out of a rental car outside the fairgrounds gate in Sparrow Gap, North Carolina on the morning of August 26th, 1978, having talked his road manager Sully into the detour on the strength of a single line in a local newspaper somebody had left folded on a diner counter in Asheville the night before.

He had just finished two sold-out shows there, his voice still a little rough around the edges from it, and for once the calendar had handed him a whole free day before the next stop. The article said the Sparrow Gap Mountain Heritage Fair drew some of the finest traditional instrument makers left in the Blue Ridge.

And John, who had never once in his life passed up the chance to look at a well-made guitar, told Sully to turn the car around before he’d even finished his coffee. The fairground sprawled across a mown hay field at the edge of town. Rows of plank tables and open-sided tents strung between the trees.

Quilts hung to catch the morning light. Black iron skillet stacked beside a blacksmith’s anvil. Corn husk dolls lined up like a small solemn congregation. A banjo player worked through a reel somewhere near the entrance, and the smell of kettle corn and wood smoke hung over everything. John walked the rows slow, hands in his pockets, nodding at folks who recognized him and plenty who did not, working his way toward the far end of the fairground where, according to a hand-painted sign, the instrument makers had their tables.

He found the booth near the very last row, tucked between a wood carver and an empty space where a vendor had apparently packed up and left early, the kind of spot fair organizers give a man they have quietly stopped expecting much from. An old man sat behind a plank table on an overturned crate, seven guitars hanging on a simple rack behind him, and John Denver stopped walking the moment he saw them.

Even from 10 ft off in the shifting light under the tent canvas, he could tell the work was extraordinary. The grain matched clean across each book matched top. The inlay work along the next fine as embroidery. Almost nobody was stopped at the table. A booth two rows back selling shiny imported instruments stacked three deep at $60 a piece had drawn a small crowd all its own.

Two teenage boys stood off to one side of Garland’s table. One of them watching the guitars with a stillness that had nothing to do with the others walking past. Nobody standing in that hay field that Saturday morning had any notion that the next hour would change the whole shape of an old man’s life and that Sparrow Gap would tell the story every August for 30 years running.

If quiet stories about ordinary kindness still mean something to you, subscribe because there are not many places left willing to tell them. John crossed to the table and lifted one of the guitars down off of the rack without a word. Careful the way you handle something you already suspect is special. The old man behind the table looked up without much hope in his face.

The particular tiredness of a man who has watched three days of a fair pass him by. The kind of tired that settles into the shoulders more than the legs. That one there’s $220, he said flat like he was reading a price off a can already braced for the customary polite retreat. Might be more than you’re looking to spend, mister, but I don’t build them cheap and I won’t sell them cheap, either.

Seen enough fellows pick one up and set it back down again this week to know how that usually goes. I wasn’t asking for a discount, John said turning the instrument over in the light. He settled it against his knee, ran his thumb across the strings, and picked out a few notes low and easy testing the tone and something in the sound of it made him stop and do it again slower listening harder the second time.

The old man watched him do it with the flat patience of somebody who had shown this same performance to a hundred disinterested strangers that week. And it was not until John looked up, still half smiling at the sound of the thing, that something shifted in the old man’s face. A slow dawning, the way recognition comes to a person who has not been looking for it.

“Lord,” he said quietly, “you’re him off the records.” John laughed and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Guilty,” he said. “Though I will tell you standing next to this instrument, I feel a good deal less impressive than usual. What’s your name, friend?” “Garland Hicks,” the old man said, getting slowly to his feet like the moment demanded it, even though his knees plainly disagreed.

He put out a hand rough and split across the knuckles from a lifetime of tool work, and John shook it, then reached into his jacket pocket and set a worn guitar pick on the corner of the plank table, the way he sometimes did without quite planning to. “For luck,” he said. “Though I don’t imagine you need much of it building instruments like this.

” John settled onto an upturned crate across from him in no hurry at all. “How long have you been doing this, Garland?” “53 years,” Garland said, and something in his shoulders eased just saying the number out loud. My daddy taught me on this very bench, more or less. Started me sanding at 12 years old before I was near tall enough to reach the vise proper.

Every piece since has come out of these same two hands, right there in the shop behind my house. Same three windows he built it with.” He nodded at the rack. “Every piece of wood’s got a guitar hiding in it somewhere. My job’s just to find it. That’s what he told me, and it’s the truest thing anybody ever taught me.” “Your wife help you with the business end of it?” John asked easy, no particular weight in the question yet.

Garland’s face went still a moment. “Ruth passed six years back,” he said, “1972. We never had children of our own, which is its own kind of quiet some days.” He ran a hand along the edge of the table, not quite meeting John’s eyes. “This is my third year bringing guitars to this fair, and every year I sell a little less than the year before.

Folks want the shiny catalog ones now, $90 made in some factory up north, and I understand it, prices being what they are. But when I’m gone, there won’t be one soul left in this county who knows how to do this work, and that thought keeps me up some nights worse than my knees do.” “Sold one guitar all week,” Garland admitted, quieter now.

“$180 to a fellow buying it for his grandson. First sale I’ve made since Thursday morning.” He looked at the seven remaining instruments on the rack like a man taking stock of something he was not sure he would get to finish. “I keep telling myself that’s one guitar that’s going to outlive both of us. Some years that has got to be reason enough to keep coming back to this table.

” “Play me something,” John said, nodding at the guitar still resting across his own knee. “I would like to hear what one of these actually sounds like in the hands of somebody who knows it.” Garland hesitated, glanced at the thin trickle of fair traffic passing the tent, then reached for the guitar hanging next on the rack, his own, the one he never sold.

“There’s a song I’ve hummed at this bench near every day for 30 years,” he said. “Never much cared whether anybody heard it or not, seemed to suit the work.” Without further ceremony, he began to play “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” his voice rough but sure, a working man’s voice that had clearly sung this exact tune to an empty shop a thousand times over.

A few fair-goers slowed as they passed, then stopped outright, and by the second verse, John had picked his own borrowed guitar back up and fallen in alongside him, harmonizing low, the two of them playing that plain, proud, dirt-under-the-fingernails song together in front of a gathering crowd under the tent canvas.

People came from three rows over to see what the sound was. By the time the last chord rang out, a solid ring of fairgoers stood around the little booth, and for a second, nobody moved or said a word, the way a crowd goes quiet right before it remembers how to clap. Then somebody in front asked, “Plain, how much for the one John had just been playing?” And within the hour, six of the seven guitars on that rack had sold, $220 apiece, cash and checks passed hand to hand across the little plank table faster than Garland Hicks could properly write out a receipt. He kept glancing up between transactions like he expected somebody to tell him it was all a mistake. When the crowd finally thinned, John sat back down across from him, and the joking had mostly gone quiet in his face. “I know a little something about being told what you make is out of style,” he said. “For years, plenty of folks in this business called my songs corny, too simple, too soft for the times, not sophisticated enough to matter.

Radio men who thought themselves serious critics told me straight to my face I would never last past a season or two.” He shrugged, easy, though something steadier sat underneath it. “Turned out a whole lot of ordinary people did not much care what the critics called it. They just wanted something honest to listen to.

I expect that is closer to the truth of what you have been building here than any price a catalog ever put on a factory guitar.” Garland looked at him a long moment, something loosening in his face that had been held tight for longer than a week. “I know what that is like,” he said quietly. “Watching something you know is true get passed over for something cheaper and shinier.

I know it well, friend,” John said. “Me, too.” Neither one said much else for a moment, the two of them sitting there amid the wreck of a plank table, now mostly empty of guitars, and the silence between them was not the tired kind Garland had been sitting in all week. John looked at the one guitar left hanging on the rack, the only one nobody had reached for.

“That one there,” he said. “Don’t sell that one today.” Garland followed his gaze, puzzled. “I want to talk to you about wood,” John said. “Not guitars, wood. Spruce, rosewood, whatever you’re running low on because a man who sells six guitars in an hour is going to be short on stock come next season, and I would like to place an order now in advance for whatever you can build me over the coming year, paid up front.

” Garland’s chin came up, the old pride flaring even through the good fortune of the afternoon. “That sounds a fair sight like charity dressed up nice, Mr. Denver.” John shook his head. “It’s a commission, same as any luthier takes from a customer with the sense to plan ahead.” He nodded at the empty rack.

“You said it yourself, every piece of wood’s got a guitar hiding in it. I’m just paying you now to go find a few of them before next August gets here.” He named the figure, $340, enough for a full year’s supply of the tonewood Garland had been rationing careful for two seasons, and held out a hand like the deal was already settled because as far as John was concerned, it was.

“First, though, we eat,” John said, standing and offering a hand down. “Nobody ever figured out a wood order on an empty stomach.” They walked together to the Laurel Diner, two blocks off the fairground, Sully trailing behind with the particular resigned look of a man who had seen this exact expression on John’s face plenty of times, and over two plates of chicken and dumplings at $1.

60 apiece, John laid out the rest of it plain. He would make a call that week to a friend at the Blue Ridge Heritage Guild about securing Garland a proper paid vendor slot at their bigger spring fair in Asheville, the kind of table placement that actually drew serious buyers instead of leaving a man tucked in the last row past an empty booth.

Garland listened to all of it with his fork forgotten halfway to his mouth, the same look on his face he’d worn watching the guitar sell that morning, like a man waiting to be told the whole thing was somebody’s idea of a joke. “No photographs,” John said before Garland could work up much of a thank you. “No names in any paper if it can be helped.

If anybody asks how your year turned around, you tell them a stranger stopped at your table and bought a guitar, same as anybody could have. That is closer to the truth than people might guess.” Garland nodded slow, working the guitar pick John had given him earlier between two rough fingers, like he meant to keep it close from here on out.

Two weeks later, the first mail-order letter arrived at Garland’s little shop, a fellow up in Boone who had heard about the fair from a cousin, wanting a guitar built to his own specifications and willing to wait however long it took. Two more letters followed within the week and then a fourth, more orders arriving in a month than Garland had filled in the previous 2 years combined.

He was glad of it and said so to anybody who asked, but gladness does not make a 71-year-old man’s hands move any faster than they are inclined to move. He started working past dark, past supper some nights, the shop light burning long after the rest of the house had gone quiet. One exhausted evening in early September, rushing to finish a neck joint before the light gave out entirely, he caught his thumb wrong on a chisel and had to set the tool down and sit a while at the bench with a rag wrapped tight around the cut, wondering for the first time in 53 years whether his hands were finally telling him something he did not much want to hear. He nearly wrote back to the man in Boone that week to say he could not manage the order after all. Got as far as finding a pencil before he set it back down, unwilling to be the kind of man who turned away the first real demand his work had seen in years. He was still turning the letter over in his mind 3 days later when his

neighbor’s wife mentioned in passing at the feed store that her son Miles had not stopped talking about the day the guitar sold out at the fair. The boy having stood at the edge of that crowd the whole hour without saying a single word to anybody. Garland remembered him then. One of the two boys who had lingered at the table all three slow days before John Denver ever showed up. The quieter one.

Watching the joinery work like he was trying to memorize it. 15 years old. Son of Dale Yount who ran the hardware and carpentry shop in town. Already handy with tools by his own father’s teaching. Garland sent word through the boy’s mother that if Miles wanted to come by the shop some afternoon and sweep up, there might be worse ways to spend a Saturday.

By the middle of November, Miles Yount was coming by most afternoons after school. Sweeping first, then sanding, then watching close enough that Garland started explaining things out loud without quite deciding to. The way a man talks to himself except this time somebody was actually listening. The thumb healed slow but clean.

A thin white line across the pad that Garland figured he would carry the rest of his life. And he found he did not much mind having it. The mail order pile shrank a little more each week with four hands working instead of two. Even if one pair was still learning where to put themselves and knocked over a jar of finish more than once.

By Thanksgiving, Miles had sanded his first top smooth enough that Garland let him carry it over to the glue press without hovering the whole time. Garland caught himself humming. Thank God I’m a country boy at the bench some afternoons without noticing he had started. The same as he had done for 30 years before that August, except now there was somebody else in the shop to hear it, and somebody else, more often than not, humming along a half beat behind him.

The following August, a full year to the week since a man in round glasses had stopped at a nearly empty table, the Sparrow Gap Mountain Heritage Fair came around again, and this time Garland Hicks’s booth sat in the second row from the entrance, not the last, with a small line of fairgoers waiting their turn to look at instruments hanging on a rack that needed restocking twice over the weekend.

16-year-old Miles Yount stood beside the workbench they had set up for demonstration, showing curious visitors how a dovetail joint fit together, his own hands steadier now than they had been the previous fall. The seventh guitar from that first August, the one John Denver had asked him not to sell, hung above the workbench still.

Miles’s first real solo project now half underway on its twin sitting in a vise beside it. Above the shop door back in town, Garland had carved and hung a small wooden sign that read simply, “Hicks and Yount Luthiers.” And when customers asked who Yount was, Garland told them the truth, that he was the fellow who was going to keep this whole business honest long after Garland himself had gone the way of every piece of wood eventually.

Pinned inside the workshop, beside the good tools, hung the very first $220 price tag from that August afternoon. And when Miles asked once why he bothered keeping such a plain scrap of cardboard, Garland told him the same thing his own father had told him on this exact bench 54 years before. “Every piece of wood’s got a guitar hiding in it,” he said.

“Your job is just to find it.” What happened at that plank table in August of 1978 never made a single headline anywhere. And that was exactly how the man who caused it wanted it kept. Some kindnesses are not meant to be famous. They are only meant to be handed down quiet, the way a craft gets handed down, from a father’s bench to a stranger’s ear, to a boy sweeping sawdust who did not yet know he was about to spend the rest of his life with wood in his hands.

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