Book Review: Hanging Tree Guitars

For over 50 years, Freeman Vines has transformed materials culled from a forgotten landscape in his relentless pursuit of building a guitar capable of producing a singular tone that has haunted his dreams. From tobacco barns, mule troughs and radio parts, he has created hand-carved guitars, each instrument seasoned down to the grain by the echoes of its past life. When Vines acquires a mysterious stack of wood from the site of a lynching, Vines and co-author Duffy find themselves each grappling with the spiritual unrest and the psychic toll of racial violence living in the very grain of America.

By Freeman Vines and Timothy Duffy

(paperback) $32.95