Homer’s Odyssey: David Rawlings’ unlikely new archtop (orig appeared in the Fretboard Journal 41)

For over a decade, David Rawlings has been synonymous with just one guitar: The humble, small-bodied 1935 Epiphone Olympic archtop. We’ve seen it accompany Rawlings as much as his music partner Gillian Welch does, which is to say, always. And, as Rawlings’ profile has slowly grown from Americana buzz artist to all-around guitar hero, he’s singlehandedly raised the value on the instrument. Many seeking that unmistakable Rawlings’ tone – that mind-altering, driving mid-range – have tried to lay their hands on an Epi.

But, listen closely to Rawling’s Poor David’s Almanac, and you might notice something has changed. Yes, Rawlings trademark runs – shades of Norman Blake, Jerry Garcia and Doc Watson – aren’t going anywhere, but the guitar tone is bit fuller. Different strings? Different microphone setup? Nope, the whole album was recorded on another guitar. And not just any guitar… a 1959 D’Angelico Excel custom ordered by Homer Haynes (of Homer & Jethro fame). Rawlings bought the guitar from Gruhn Guitars; it’s owner in between Homer and Rawlings was none other than Ranger Doug.

“It’s a 1959 D’Angelico Excel,” Rawlings says of his latest guitar acquisition. “It was ordered by Homer Haynes. I think John D’Angelico had just made a mandolin for Jethro Burns. I have photocopies of the letters that kind of went back and forth.

“It sounds like what happened is Homer sent D’Angelico a Stromberg to get repaired. And then they start discussing [D’Angelico] making an archtop for him. And John sort of gives him the price list of what he makes. I think the top-of-the-line is this thing, which is in Excel but made similar to Johnny Smith’s. It’s really a marvelous instrument.

“[Ranger Doug] had it at George Gruhn’s but it wasn’t ever really listed. I went in there for some reason. George is a very interesting guy and has been a good friend for many years. I’ll be just sitting there talking with someone about something else and all of a sudden George will appear with some guitar. He put this giant D’Angelico in my hands and said, ‘You know, maybe this can be your new style?’”

Rawlings admits that he’d been looking for a second guitar for a while. “I’d been looking for a lot of years for an archtop that could do some of the things that my little Epiphone can do – in terms of the way it projects or the way it cuts – but that had a larger body. [I wanted] something that was a little mellower and had a little more chunk or beef in the low end,” he says.

Over the course of his search, he once found himself smitten with a dot-neck 16” Gibson L-5 from the ‘20s—just like Maybelle Carter’s that Gruhn was offering and “started trying to sell everything I owned at the time to get my hands on it” but the deal fell through. Rawlings said the sound of that guitar – and the way it complimented his Olympic – sort of haunted him.

“The banjo that I play now is a Whyte Laydie,” he adds. “We first heard a banjo like that at the Music Emporium in Cambridge in, I think, 1995. It was $3000 or something at the time and this is at a time where $300 would have been way out of my price range! I looked for 20 years to try to find a banjo [like that] and I didn’t really even play [banjo] at the time,” he says, laughing. “I just picked it up and hit some chords on it of that had that that sounded similar enough to me that I understood I’d be able to use it. Finally, I came up with one.

“Sometimes I start to think I’m crazy – did [an instrument] really sound a particular way or am I just misremembering? I always feel good when I finally find something that I know will do the job,” he adds. “This D’Angelico… it really fits the bill. It did a lot of the same things that that L-5 had done, even though it’s a different body size, it had the same kind of voice.

“To be honest, part of the reason I wanted this guitar is to have something that’s an archtop but that is easier to play and is a little more useful as an accompaniment instrument when you’re writing songs. The little Epiphone is very much a lead instrument in my mind, that’s what it does. So having something that straddled the line was nice.”

Truth be told, there’s another storied guitar all over Poor David’s Almanac. Welch is now the proud owner of a Gibson Hummingbird that Nashville session musician Wayne Moss bought new in 1960. It’s a bit of a Music City talisman: Moss promptly installed a zero fret on it and strung it up in Nashville tuning. “It's one of the main if not themain Nashville-strung guitar on those early Nashville records,” Rawlings says. “From what I understood from Wayne, it's not just Wayne who played it. It was one of these guitars that sort of hung around at the studio and the other sort of session guitar players of that time are picking it up sometimes and using it on sessions even if it's not what Wayne's doing.

“It stands as the most reliably great sounding acoustic guitar I've ever heard on a microphone,” he says. “If you think oh maybe this will work on the track, a lot of times the Nashville tuning will sound sort of a bit like a bit of a novelty to me on a lot of instruments, but this has a chimey harmonic sound that doesn't really call attention to itself. I really understand how it managed to you know find its way on the hundreds and hundreds of records.” 

Listening to Poor David’s Almanac, you can hear the difference – however subtle – that these two guitars make. Rawlings is quick to point out that, even on a record billed as his, it’s Welch who should get a lot of the credit. “What Gil does on an acoustic guitar, which is truly the basis for this whole style of playing, is finding things that fit in with her playing which is you know criminally underappreciated in the world of guitar. There’s more nuance in [her playing], and there are more decisions being made.

“What was funny about switching to these two different guitars is that taking the low notes away from her and sort of making them mush in the way a high strung does -- you still have those lines but they've jumped up an octave -- and then sort of filling it in with what I was doing down there really gave us an interesting change in color, texture and the balance of power.”

As is painfully clear, Rawlings is a musician with great ears and a stellar recall for tone. This can be a blessing and a curse. He wraps up our conversation with an amusing tale about his Epiphone slowly losing its tone. “It really opened up this beautiful place and then it just kind of went past it. I kept using it I didn't have any choice but I was really upset about the tone I was getting,” he says. He consulted with Joe Glaser and the pair considered going so far as to remove the top of the Olympic. “The punchline of the story was we were like investigating the inside of the instrument and realized that what had been happening is over all of these years and all of these performances are enough sort of lint from my suit I had fallen in there and sort of coated the lower bout and there was a big ball of it… you could also see like it was all there was like a pretty sizable acoustic baffle.

“We got it all out of there and it was largely back to how it started,” he says with glee. -Jason Verlinde