Call me last. Those three words have become David Davidson’s calling card in the vintage guitar world and they catch you off guard, as perhaps they are supposed to. But what do they mean?
We’re sitting in his office at Well Strung Guitars, the Long Island-based store that he co-owns with his daughter, Paige. It contains some of the most jaw-dropping instruments you’ll ever see. A dozen ’Bursts hang on one wall. Across the room are more than 20 Blackguard Teles, Broadcasters and Esquires. In the middle are two 50s Flying Vs facing a wall of custom-colour Firebirds. All original, no refins, no reissues. If even a drop of guitar-loving blood flows in your veins, this place is a dreamland – an Area 51 of tone, where things you didn’t even think existed hang right there on the wall, waiting to be played.
“‘Call me last’ has been my tagline since I started this thing,” David says, leaning his elbows on his desk. “Go find out everything you want – talk to anyone you want to. But before you sell your guitar, call me last – don’t make a mistake and sell it too cheap… that was always my thing.”
David fell in love with vintage guitars at a young age and started trading them when he was barely into his teens. Over the years, he’s been able to track down some of the rarest instruments in the world and has been known to pay a premium to acquire them. But he’s also a committed steward of historic guitars and wants to raise awareness of America’s guitar-making heritage. In 2017, he helped establish what was arguably the greatest exhibition of vintage guitars there’s ever been – the Songbirds Museum in Chattanooga – donating scores of instruments from his own collection and involving A-list musicians from his contact book with the museum’s work. To David’s astonishment, a film about Songbirds even won an Emmy this year.
The pandemic, however, brought changes to the museum’s plans and Songbirds has since shifted its focus towards general pop-music history, with fewer guitars on show. Recently, David and Paige undertook the laborious task of returning a truckful of the rarest Songbirds instruments to Well Strung Guitars. Today, if you happen to be passing the store, you can walk in off the street and play a piece of history. In fact, the business has more custom and prototype electrics from the 50s and 60s than we’ve ever seen. Such instruments, by their very nature, were made in far fewer numbers than standard production guitars. But they also tended to be at the cutting edge of their era’s lutherie. And that’s why we’re here: to learn what the rarest instruments from Fender and Gibson’s golden age can teach us about guitar history.
PAINTING LESSONS
One of the earliest ways electric guitar makers customised instruments was with paint. And paint can tell you a surprising amount about how things were done back in the day. The first guitar we examine at Well Strung Guitars is a case in point: a 1953 Fender Telecaster in Aztec Gold (see page opposite), which predates by three
