By Jim Hagarty
2018
I have played guitar for 50 years, come 2019. I still play the same guitar I bought when I was learning to play in 1969. I am left handed and so is my guitar. From the time I started, I was aware that the Rolls Royce of guitars is the Martin. Other amazing instruments have come along in the intervening years and some would say some of them surpass the Martin. But Martin got burned into my brain and I always have wanted to play one, if not own one. I have seen dozens of Martins at the jams I have gone to over the years but I had never played one: They were all for right-handed players.
That all changed on Saturday when I sat down at our regular jam next to a woman I had never met. She is left handed, like me, and she was playing a left-handed, Martin steel-string acoustic, the instrument I have always dreamed about. Eventually, she offered to let me play it so we switched guitars. I have a steel string at home. It is a Martin copy. But here, in my hands, was the real thing. The next song got going and I started playing my dream come true. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, but it was simply amazing. The responsiveness of the strings, the crispness and warmth of the sound, the ease of depressing the strings to the frets. It was like a car lover finally getting behind the wheel of a Rolls Royce. An experience not soon to be forgotten, if never to be repeated.
