For some guitarists, the glory of a vast collection is just as sweet as the glory they find on the stage. But for bluegrasser-turned-Eagle Vince Gill, he finds deeper pride in knowing that he doesn’t amass large quantities of guitars. He doesn’t have a warehouse of axes collecting dust. Gill uses the guitars he has, and many of them hold as much sentimental value as functional.
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As Gill recalled during the 2010 NasH2O Auction Launch Party, he only sold two instruments in his life. The first, he explained, was a newer Martin “that wasn’t very good.” He sold the Martin, along with all of the money he had saved up to that point, to buy a 1942 D28 Martin Herringbone. “If you were a bluegrasser, you had to have a Herringbone,” Gill said. “That was the Holy Grail of guitars.”
The other instrument sale, Gill said, was something his friends called a “mercy selling.” Gill’s only other guitar sale was a steel guitar. “I was a frustrated steel player,” the country singer recalled. “The strings were too close together for me to ever figure out how to gouge the right one.”
Still, even when he doesn’t have success with a certain instrument, Gill said parting ways with them was “excruciating.” And that made the first days of May 2010 particularly devastating.
Vince Gill Once Parted Ways With a Huge Portion of His Guitar Collection, but It Was Against His Will
During his 2010 speech, Vince Gill recalled the harrowing two days that marked the 2010 Tennessee floods. The Cumberland River swelled to an all-time-high crest on May 1 and 2, flooding Music City, resulting in vast property damage and multiple deaths. The natural disaster devastated SoundCheck Nashville, a facility that offers rehearsal and storage space for musicians. While Gill watched the river rise, he began thinking about his friends and colleagues’ businesses west of the Cumberland. The east side of the river, where SoundCheck was, Gill admitted months later, hadn’t occurred to him.
Gill said when he received a call about the damage to SoundCheck, “I said, ‘Oh, crap. I never even thought about the east side of the river. It’ll flood too, genius. I was mortified because I had probably 150 instruments down in there.”
In a 2017 interview with Guitar Aficionado, Gill said, “All told, about 50 guitars were compromised. Some could be rescued, although not many. Most were ruined. I lost a guitar used on ‘One More Last Chance’ and a couple of guitars that my friends made for me. Amy [Grant, Gill’s wife] gave me a nice, old, small-bodied Taylor that I used on a duet I did with her from 93 called ‘House of Love’. That one got destroyed. It was a real painful spring cleaning.”
Gill added in 2010 and 2017 that in the midst of his heartache over the lost gear, his wife provided a critical shift in perspective. Choking back tears in 2010, Gill recounted, “Amy saw the shock on my face. She knew I was just about to completely unglue. She looked at me [and] says, ‘Just remember: all you need is on guitar to make a living.’”
Photo by Sherry Rayn Barnett/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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