Tools of the trade - John Lee Hooker’s “Muddywood”

 

John Lee Hooker with the 'Muddywood' guitar, made from wood from Muddy Waters' childhood home.

Billy Gibbons: “I had phoned Jim O’Neil, founder of Living Blues magazine – he now lives in Mississippi – and accompanied him to the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale. It so happened that Sid Graves, the director, said he was making a trip to Stovall Farms, where Muddy Waters was raised, to inspect the cabin that was in danger of being taken down upon request of the Highway Department for safety reasons. The cabin had been hit by a tornado and they figured, well, it might fall down.

“As we were looking about, the director picked up a piece of scrap lumber and said, `Why don’t you take a souvenir, here.’ There was quite a large beam left over, and we loaded it into the car.

“I drove back to Memphis and I was speaking with Rick Rayburn and Rick Hancock, the proprietors of the Pyramid Guitar Co., and mentioned having this piece of wood. I said, why don’t we make a guitar out of it? They said sure, let’s have a look.

“I unloaded it and left it with them, and two weeks later they called and said they had a couple of things in mind, why don’t I stop by?

“I drove back, spent about 20 minutes doing the design. It was humble beginnings for what really is an offering to the Delta Blues Museum. The guitar can be a focal point for modern blues musicians to pay homage to the museum, which has been doing a fine job of preserving this art form we now know as American music.”

What kind of wood was this?

“It was a piece of cypress wood that was apparently part of the roof. It was a difficult piece of wood to work with. It was filled with knotholes and nails. In fact, there are actually two instruments from this effort – the first being kind of the test piece, the experimental piece, and the final, finished piece being the one presented to the museum. I kept the first one, which I’ll probably end up using on tour. The second piece is the one presented to the museum and leased to the Hard Rock.”

What factors did you take into account in the design? Did Muddy play a similar guitar?

“Yes, in the beginning I said let’s try to keep this design aesthetic as an instrument that would be usable as we might expect from Muddy Waters. And as we got near to the completion of the project, the decision was made to make it a donation to the museum. Rather that paint the instrument blue, we decided against that because it was just too corny. The Mississippi River paint scheme was applied to the instrument as a symbol of the power of what the river has come to be known and interpreted as. Certainly, it was the Mississippi River that gave the initial rise to the Delta, which of course became the fertile ground for the invention of the blues.

“The museum guitar is really the `player.’ There was just something about it upon completion. It not only sounded great, but it played like melted butter.”

Photo by Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images