Guitar: An American Life by Tim Brookes. Grove Atlantic Press; May 2005; 339 pages; $24. Audio book version Blackstone Audio.

FROM THE DUST JACKET:

"Shortly before his 50th birthday, baggage handlers destroyed Tim Brookes's guitar, his traveling companion of 22 years. His wife promised on the spot to replace it with the guitar of his dreams, but Tim discovered that a dream guitar is built, not bought.

"He set out to find someone to make him the perfect guitar -- a quest that ended up a dirt road on the Green Mountains of Vermont, where an amiable curmudgeon master-guitar-maker, Rick Davis, took a rare piece of cherry wood and went to work with saws, rasps, and files.

"When Tim wasn't breathing over Rick's shoulder, he was trying to unravel the symbolic associations a guitar holds for so many of us, musicians and nonmusicians alike. What was it about a small, humble folk instrument that allowed it to become an American icon? How did the guitar come to represent freedom, the open road, protest and rebellion, the blues, youth, lost love, and sexuality? Why is it that the guitar outsells all other instruments combined? His quest took him across the country, talking to historians, curators, guitar makers, and guitarists.

"Arriving with conquistadors and colonists, the guitar has been in an extraordinary variety of hands: those of miners and society ladies, lumberjacks and presidents' wives, Hawaiians, African-Americans, Cajuns, spiritualists, communists, and singing cowboys of the silver screen. Inventors and crackpots tinkered with it, introduced electricity, and the humble folk instrument became the basis of a musical revolution. In time it became America's instrument, the voice of its soundtrack."

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Kirkus Reviews: (starred review) With a storyteller's -- and a guitarist's -- sense of pitch and timing, NPR commentator/essayist Brookes delivers both a cultural history of the guitar and a chronicle of the intricate process that went into the construction of his own dream instrument.

It all started when airline baggage handlers destroyed Brookes's guitar. His 50th birthday was approaching; his generous wife suggested a nice new one. Expanding on that idea, he decided to get a custom guitar "that would curl up on my lap like a cat," built by one of the many fine-instrument makers in his home state of Vermont. The luthier he chose lived nearby, so Brookes was able to observe the process. He shares his observations with readers, who also benefit from his extensive knowledge of the guitar's past. Interweaving these two stories, warm and droll by turns, Brookes gracefully blends the personal with the factual, never letting one get the upper hand. The guitar-making, a beautiful thing to witness, is still largely a mystery: it seems the physics of guitars is too complex for human understanding, thus the endless tinkering and innovation. The guitar's history is equally fascinating and just as mysterious, at least in its early years. It was always the object of the swells' suspicion: a thing of the gypsies, the blacks, the poor whites; an outlaw object that became even more dangerous to the keepers of moral order when it fell into the hands of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. Brookes covers a wide swath: the dash of flamenco and the surf rock of Dick Dale, the handiwork of Ernest Tubb and Angres Segovia, early blues, late blues, parlor music, Hawaiian steel, black slide, the British Invasion, the mainstreaming of the instrument, and its domestication.

An intelligent work with the quality of a sonorous voice drifting from a radio.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tim Brookes: Born of poor but honest parents in London, England. Mother played piano, grandmother sang strange and oddly cruel music-hall songs, father seemed to have little musical interest but nevertheless owned the best Django Reinhardt LP. Had the usual boring, humiliating piano lessons as a child. Took up the guitar at 17 in the usual gesture of protest. Wanted to be a writer but played guitar in pubs and wine bars when all else failed. Emigrated to America in 1980. Now plays flute and guitar duets with his wife Barbara at the usual New Age Vermont weddings and teaches in the Professional Writing Program at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. Guitar: An American Life is his fifth book.

WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS:

Yes, yes. It's true, that's how it all started, with the horror of seeing my guitar with its neck cracked so badly that only a thin strip of veneer was holding the head on. And the fact that this ghastly experience turned into a book was entirely due to two things my wife said. The first, when she found me making pathetic whimpering noises over my ruined guitar, was "I'll buy you a new guitar for your 50th birthday" -- more a gesture of moral support than anything else, as neither of us had any money, but it helped. The second, when I told her what difficulty I was having making a choice because in the previous decade or two the entire world of guitars had burst into this fascinating, kaleidoscopic new array of makes, models, and color, was to reply, "You should write about this."

Now the book is done -- though, what fascinates me more, looking back over the last two and a half years, is not what started it all off but what kept me going. A nonfiction writer is kept going by discoveries, either in the material world or in himself or herself, and those unexpected discoveries were what kept the subject unfolding like an infinite series of fractals, each as interesting as the last.

The first was in the field of pure research. I found that the New York Times was now available online in searchable form and started reading in a way that would never have been humanly possible before, tracking every single use of the word "guitar" from the mid-19th Century onward. (The American Memory pages of the Library of Congress site are also searchable and later gave me a similar series of serendipitous glimpses.)

Some were mentions of people whose name was Guitar. Some turned up on pages entirely covered with print so tiny I never did find the reference. Some were repeated advertisements, though those in themselves were interesting, showing as they did images of turn-of-the-century ladies in long dresses and men in straw hats taking their guitars, mandolins, and banjos down to the beach or out in a canoe.

A spectacular number, though, were news stories. Not news stories about guitars or guitarists, though. No profiles, no reviews, no new-gear test-runs, no interviews with famous tight-trousered mullet-heads. Not even brand consciousness. I didn't come across a single guitar brand name until the 1960s. Even a handsome or expensive or well-made guitar was still just a guitar, not a Martin or a Joseph Bohmann or a Weymann or an Ashborn. A guitar was just a thing you had around the house. It was the badminton racquet of instruments.

Here's the thing: over the second half of the 19th Century the guitar had fallen from favor as a performance instrument. Consequently, every time that the guitar was mentioned it was mentioned in passing, glimpsed out of the corner of the reporter's eye, and as a result it always seemed to be keeping exotic or even bizarre company -- company so interesting, unexpected, and now long gone that the guitar became a way of looking at America, an oddly angled keyhole, a bent periscope.

Take the story about the guitarist who played one of the very first gigs to be broadcast over the radio and was promptly tracked down by his wife (and a patrolman on nearby traffic duty) and arrested for abandonment and failure to pay child support. How could he not have known that he was doing something so stupid? He must not have grasped exactly what radio meant: that the guitar no longer had an effective range of maybe 30 feet and that now its range was almost infinite. Radio was causing a quantum change in America in general, and the guitar in particular, and this story perfectly captures that drama, that bewilderment.

Or the story of the Long Island hotelier who was so incensed that the college boys on his staff spent so much time romancing the lady guests with guitars and mandolins that he called a cop, who said, "I'll give you ten minutes to gather up your guitars and your fancy socks and get out of this town." Guitars and fancy socks? What does hosiery say about the company the guitar was keeping? There's class warfare at work here, and the Irish cop was incensed that these sons of the wealthy were idle enough to be playing guitars -- a charge that would be repeated loud and often, 60 years later.

Guitars were strangely often mentioned in connection with crime. I read that when the leader of the notorious Black Hand Society of Northern Westchester, the Sicilian Antonio La Rosa, was arrested, his sweetheart, also Sicilian, claimed he had an alibi: at the time of the robbery in question, she was playing her guitar and singing to him. Or more dramatic, the testimony of Prince Yousoupoff that yes, he had poisoned Rasputin and passed the time waiting for the monk to die (unsuccessfully, as it happened) by playing his guitar. Or most dramatic still, the report that Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde fame, had begun his career in crime by getting a shopkeeper out of bed on the pretext that Barrow wanted to buy guitar strings and Barrow shooting the man as soon as the man turned his back.

Some guitar stories were flat-out bizarre, infinitely more fascinating than anything that has ever appeared in Rolling Stone. How about the story of the sad death of a Coney Island carnival pig called Strenuous Lifer, killed by the carnival's lion. The pig was said to have been worth $700 on account of the amazing tricks he could perform: donning a napkin, eating a meal from soup to cheese without soiling the linen, and playing on a guitar.

The more I read, the more I found guitars where I least expected to find them: guitars being played in beer gardens, on railway station platforms, at racetracks, between the bouts in boxing matches, on river outings, at the beach, on picnics, by blind preachers and at a college for the deaf and dumb, by Italian barbers and Russian gypsies, by young ladies at finishing school or the YWCA, by soldiers in Pershing's army and on the Staten Island ferry. It was the last age of live music, and everyone was grateful for whatever entertainment was on offer. When a San Francisco-Chicago train was so badly held up by snow that the journey took three weeks, at one particularly long holdup in Percy, Wyoming, the passengers, who included Susan B. Anthony, senators, Japanese princes, and a Russian count, held a "ball" in the back of a grocery store, with dance music "furnished by a guitar, a mouth-harmonicon, and a fine-tooth comb." By all accounts, the Times reported, "The pleasure was exquisite."

I was fascinated by this exotic landscape, vivid and bursting with life in the wonderfully expressive prose of turn-of-the-century journalism, yet unfathomable, as if under a pane of glass. For two months I wished I could write nothing but true stories of this extraordinary America, using the guitar as little more than a thread and an excuse.

What gradually took over, though, as the guiding and energizing force behind the book, was a more internal question. Whatever I write about, I try to find a mystery at the heart of it, and the mystery that occupied me almost constantly until the book was done, and still occupies me, is the question of the cat on the lap. What is it about the guitar that makes it such a personal instrument, so intimate to both player and listener?

(Behind this is an even deeper mystery, the very question of how it is that something as intangible and transitory as music is able to have such a powerful effect on us, an effect so exquisitely tuned -- so to speak -- that an A minor 6 chord has a completely distinct emotional gestalt to, say, an A minor 7, which has only one different note, and that only half a tone different. But I soon realized that this question was simply too much for me or for anyone.)

The whole conundrum was summed up, for me, in a photograph someone took at a party when I was in college. It shows two people and a small bonfire. It's very late in the evening: the mayhem phase of the party has died down, most of the mayhemeers have left, and the time has come to pull out a cheap guitar, go out into the small back yard, light a bonfire, and sing songs. I'm wearing jeans and sneakers and a thick coat like a navy peacoat -- my hitchhiking gear -- and playing the $35 classical guitar I took everywhere, even across the Atlantic to America, leaning slightly forward as if folding myself over the instrument. The guitar is the most intimate instrument: it's the only instrument shaped to fit the human body, the only instrument you enfold into your heart, your lungs, your gut.

On the other side of the small bonfire is a girl called Tina Rogers, who if anything is leaning even farther forward, as if listening to the music through the top of her head. We liked each other very much, even dated for a few days, but the photo isn't about that, exactly. It's about the fact that the guitar is bringing us together in a way that nothing else could. Something unforgettable is taking place, something without a name, a mysterious physics that is enveloping player and listener through the medium of a very basic guitar played without much skill. It's the alchemy of live music.

By the end of the book, my new custom-made guitar has been finished, some 11 months after the original disaster. During those 11 months I started to respect both the complex and volatile history of the guitar itself and the even more complex and volatile nature of music. To see these pieces of wood be cut and shaped, to hear from the guitarmaker that nobody understands the physics of guitar building or guitar acoustics, that every builder works slightly differently and keeps making slight changes with every guitar he or she makes -- it seemed as if all these facts and pieces of evidence had merely built up and encased that central mystery like the wood of the guitar itself, a box full of air. The product of the guitar is invisible and weightless, but it is as powerful a device as any ever invented.

The first time I heard my guitar played, it was lying on the maker's workbench. He twanged a single string, and the note reached out, grew, spread out through the whole body of the guitar, then through the air in the box, then rose above the soundhole until it seemed to have had nothing to do with the act of playing the string. It hovered independent of the materials, as if in being released from the instrument, it had now become the spirit of the note.

It took a good 15 seconds to settle, like the settling of acoustic dust, back to nothing.