The South’s Hottest Guitar
Jason Isbell, Cedric Burnside, Molly T uttle, John Osborne, Larkin Poe, Christone “Kingfish " Ingram, and More
In January 2019, Jason Isbell got a call from Christie Carter, the owner of Carter Vintage Guitars, Nashville’s premier way station for collectible instruments. The shop had just gotten some new arrivals, and Carter wondered if Isbell might want to take a look. He went in the next day. He first played a 1973 Fender Stratocaster that Ed King—one-third of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s three-pronged guitar attack—used to write the lick on “Sweet Home Alabama.” Then he picked up a 1959 Gibson Les Paul that King had nicknamed Red Eye, a guitar with such notoriety that it was once stolen from him at gunpoint (then returned to him more than ten years later). Gibson had done a few collaborations with King, so Isbell wondered if the Red Eye was the real deal. It was. Skynyrd’s early seventies records— and— are seminal albums for Isbell. When he was eight years old, growing up outside of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, his uncle taught him to play the band’s classic “Simple Man” on an Electra MPC Les Paul copy. His uncle eventually gave him the guitar—which Isbell still has—and he played constantly, often even
