Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Wes "I'm Baaaaack" Yates on September 14, 2009 at 1:03pm

Cool.

God truly works in mysterious ways.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Bluesheart on September 14, 2009 at 3:43pm

Touching story Josh, thank you for layin yourself (and Yousef!) out there.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by william E. Drumm on September 14, 2009 at 5:15pm

I enjoyed this very much...thanks for sharing..Music, for me. mainly the blues, is all about the spirit.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Josh Gayou (SmokehouseGuitars) on September 15, 2009 at 5:26am

I wanted to share the following with you all. This is a comment from one of my customers on my site in response to what I originally wrote yesterday:

"Hi Josh,
After reading your article I thought I should relay a musical experience that moved me to tears today. I spent most of my life working in the aviation industry. Seven years ago I changed careers and began work teaching kids with behaviour problems. Mostly street kids. I currently work as a Head Teacher running a suspension centre. When students are suspended from school (long 20 day suspensions) for behaviour issues they are given the option to come to the centre where I work with them to develop life skills (anger management, resilience etc).

I have been working with a 15 year old Samoan boy for the past month. He’s a real character and a great football player but violence, extortion and theft are a way of life. A friend who taught Taylor* and his brother music at the local high school told me he played the guitar and had an excellent voice. When he began at the suspension centre I asked him if he would sing for us on his last day and he agreed.

Today was Taylor’s ‘return from suspension’ meeting with his school principal. When he came in this morning he was off the air. Samoan’s, by nature, are the most laid back race on earth so I sat him down and did practice runs of the interview process. It didn’t help much he was shitting himself (mostly because his dad disciplines him with a lump of wood to the head when Taylor gets in trouble).

About midmorning I walked out to the car and grabbed my left handed little Martin and a Hannah Montana steel string acoustic (the only right handed guitar I could get hold of the night before). I handed Taylor the cheap-shit guitar and asked him to play something. The next 15 minutes were a revelation. Taylor plonked himself down, tuned the guitar and proceeded to play and sing Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven among other things.

This big boofheaded, violent, football playing thug had the voice of an angel and the piece-of-shit Chinese Hannah Montana guitar sounded absolutely raw and beautiful in his hands. More significantly, once he started to sing and play the stress and anguish just dissolved from his body. The music was pouring out of him. It wasn’t about playing a flash guitar or having years of singing lessons, he’d had neither. The music was innate, it came from his family, culture and his soul. Many Samoan families spend their free time sitting around with friends playing and singing. Taylor had picked up his skills from listening to his uncles and older brothers.

So anyway, I’m sitting there with tears rolling down my face feeling like an idiot. Taylor ended up breezing through his meeting with the Principal and now has another chance to get his act together at school. It wasn’t til I got home and read your article that I realised just what an emotional impact Taylor’s raw musicality had on me.

I guess its the raw elegance of beautiful music played on simple instruments that’s behind a guitar playing school teacher from Sydney, Australia seeking out an aeronautical engineer from California who creates beautiful guitars out of cigar boxes and finding that the journey to the instrument is almost as fulfilling as taking ownership of the end result. I have a couple of quite expensive guitars and have even had a Maton Artist built expressly for me but I have never experienced anything like the journey this process is taking me on. While I can’t wait to get my hands on my new cigar box telecaster the exquisite nature of the journey will make the final musical experience so much more fulfilling and lasting
Cheers, Mark"

• ▶ Reply