The family and I were away in Memphis for the weekend; the following are some pictures of the Gibson guitar factory here. It's the "baby" of the three that are here in the US. The tour guide -- a large man with a lisp, a pony tail of frizzy hair, a scruffy beard, and Jerry Garcia glasses (pictured here to the right) had a dry wit that you'd have to strain to catch normally, never mind all the sawing and machine noises going on all around us. The wood for the guitars is brought in from all over the world and is kept in this humidified warehouse setting.
Hundreds of gallons of water have to be used up daily to keep the wood from drying out. The table here to your left is where many of the telltale curved fronts and backs of Gibson guitars (think B. B. King's "Lucille" for this town's signature example of such) are clamped down for shaping.
It was good to see that the vast majority of the entire process of crafting Gibson guitars was still just that: a
handcraft, and obviously so. The factory employs around fifty craftsmen who cut, shape, sand, fit, and finish the wood themselves; the machine to your right was one of the few (perhaps even the only) automated steps in the process of making the guitars. This machine is what carves the mirror-image "F" shapes (think the Stradivarius violin, after which the Gibson was originally patterned) and other holes into the bodies of the guitars.
Sadly, this has led to the mass production of items bearing names of unrepeatable local legends. This holds true as well, I hate to say, for the local restaurant on Beale Street which bears the name of the man in question and which, in my opinion, is something of a "Disneyland of the Blues," to make use of a phrase of Memphis' own Ochlophobist (whom I had the pleasure of meeting and with whom we worshipped just yesterday at his parish church).
Once the wood has been curved and carved, it is glued together and bound with canvas rope, after which it is hung to dry for about two days (seen here to your right). One of the things I didn't know was that the large, wooden block that goes through the middle of electric guitars is what leads to long, middle or short sustain, depending on the density of the wood; King's Lucille is something like maple, if I remember our Garcia Guide correctly, so her medium sustain is the resulting tone.
The next part was, I believe, the part that most impressed me. While most of the craftsmanship was being done all around us, the men were very much at a distance (understandable, as we wouldn't want to disturb them). These two pictures, however, were taken of men who were behind glass in an enclosed area, hand painting guitar after guitar with airbrushes (the ever-popular "sunburst" design -- yellow with dark border color -- is what you see to your left), followed by lacquer finishes.
The guitars were hanging up just between us and the men, who worked mere feet from where we were. That they were able to maintain concentration while all of us gawked and took pictures like the no-doubt annoying tourists we were is admirable.
These buffers administer coats of wax and other sealants onto the guitars; the wax/sealants are actually absorbed into the buffers and so the spinning wheel is itself the means of final polishing.
At the end of the tour, we were led to several tables of men who were stringing and tuning the guitars -- oh, and did I mention
shredding? Yes, this was, no doubt, the best part of the tour, musically speaking. A guitarist, once finished with stringing and tuning a finished guitar, puts it through a "rigorous testing" (translation: he wails on it for about ten minutes. I tell ya', it's a tough job, but...). Once he's satisfied that the guitar lives up to the Gibson name, he signs off on it and the guitar is set to ship out.
There are, of course, guitars that fail to make the grade; these guitars are put into boxes, stacked one on top of another in a dumpster and incinerated.
Amazingly, only about five percent of all guitars that go through this process wind up being incinerated; quite a testimony to the accuracy of their craftsmanship.
And here, of course, is the guitar shop outside the factory where my brother-in-law and I sat and played some of these incredible guitars. Time well spent, to be sure.
A trip to Memphis wouldn't be complete without a ride on a riverboat down the Mighty Mississip'. Truth be told, we plan to come back to Memphis not only to see the ever-hospitable Och and his family again, but also because we in no way exhausted our itinerary, even with said boat ride. The rides were narrated by a charming, middle-aged black man whose southern drawl very much flavored all the points he mentioned during our hour-and-a-half tour. John Fogerty was right: "...I never saw the good side of the city / Till I hitched a ride on a Riverboat Queen." While Memphis had several colorful aspects to it, I'm a sucker for anything out on the water, so I have to say that this trumped even the Gibson factory...
The wheels on the boats are powered by anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 horsepower, so we moved at a pretty steady clip. We learned about the Sultana while on this particular trip. Our guide asked us who knew about the Titanic. When we all raised our hands, he asked us who had heard of the Sultana, the ship whose demise was the gravest maritime disaster in U. S. history. Of course, none of us had heard of this tragedy, this due in large part to the fact that, on April 27, 1865, the country was still recovering from the end of the War Between the States as well as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Consequently, a war-weary populace had by and large stopped reading newspapers that promised little more than continual body counts, so this major disaster went largely unnoticed, save in Memphis, since the Sultana's boiler exploded just off her coast. The details of the incident shed an even sadder light on the whole ordeal, as the 376-passenger boat was carrying almost 2,500 passengers at the time! The overload was due to the fact that, in those days following the War, boats were paid by the passenger, in large part because they were bringing back Union P.O.W.s from Confederate prison camps. The captain noticed that one boiler was damaged, but rather than replace the boiler (a three-day job), he opted for a patch-up job on the existing boiler, hence the resulting explosion. Most of the passengers (about 1,800) perished either from burns from the explosion, exposure or hypothermia in the water, or from drowning. Quite sad that such a tragedy went and still goes largely unnoticed.
The steamboats were docked by cobblestone "walkways" -- put in quotes because, due to the steep incline, one was hard-pressed to walk down with any degree of ease. They had to be driven across carefully, as well, as they would wreak havoc on tires if driven across too quickly. The cobblestones used to serve as weight in boats that would cross the Atlantic before picking up any cargo; once the ship came in, the cobblestones were dropped off and cotton was loaded up. The cobblestones were then reused to make said walkway.
And now, for the "postcard" shot. Of course, being the flag buff and states aficionado that I am, I tried to get the best shot of the Memphis skyline alongside the Tennessee state flag which flew from the mast of the boat. Y'all can use it if you like. Our guide also pointed out the flags above the Mud Island attraction that heralded all of the countries that had ever laid claim to Memphis; as this was a three-deck boat, our guide was on the second deck, and I was entertaining our daughters down on the first, I could only listen as the guide kept waiting...and waiting...for folks to identify the flags. "Yes, that's Tennessee...United States, yes...No, that's not Australia, that's England..." (Great Britain, actually. Sheesh.) I yelled helplessly at the ceiling: "France! Spain! Confederate!" I must confess to being stumped by the flag to the far right; if y'all can take a look HERE and tell me what flag that is, I'd be much obliged. Our guide probably named it, but as I was busy running after toddlers, I must have missed it.
This post and lintel is a monument of when the city of Memphis actually lost its charter as a city due to severe population decline from Yellow Fever. Not sure why this was chosen for that; perhaps a reference to the plagues of Egypt and the passing over of doors? Our guide did not say. The outbreak of 1878 led to the bankruptcy of the city of Memphis, as 5,000 of its citizens were claimed by the fever which was spread by the then-unknown means of mosquitos. The U.S. Census Bureau reported a total population drop from 40,226 people in 1870 to just 33,592 in 1880. The city didn't regain its charter until 1893.
