BLUEPRINT: Newman Guitars
Not too many small, independent guitar-makers can list The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Mike Campbell, not to mention James Honeyman-Scott and Joe Ely, as owners and players of their guitars. There are plenty more, too, and that includes a relatively recent convert in Billy F Gibbons. The brand in question is Newman Guitars whose roots take us back to the glory days and Ted Newman Jones III.
From the off, the story of Ted Newman Jones III, or just plain ‘Newman’, is a little hard to definitively pin down. He was born in Dyersburg, Tennessee, in 1949, and caught the rock ’n’ roll bug in his teens, though he found that he was better at fixing up guitars and selling them on than he was at playing them. Some sources credit Ted with bolting together ‘Blackie’ for Eric Clapton, but that’s not the story EC tells. What seems more likely is that Newman – who had a bit of a thing for The Rolling Stones – met the band when he was invited to a show on their 1969 US tour by author Stanley Booth who was on the road researching his must-read book, . Noë Goldwasser, writing for in 1981, suggested Ted was at the fabled Altamont Speedway gig on 6 December
