The 1941 guitar that Neil Young fell in love with: “It plays really well”
There wasn’t a day that went by that Neil Young didn’t respect what the guitar could do for him.
Whereas everyone else saw the instrument as a way for them to get famous back in the day, Young was using every second he had with the guitar as a way to express himself to the fullest of his abilities, even if it meant having to go through the deepest parts of his soul. But sometimes the best guitars tend to have songs inside them that are waiting to be brought out whenever they’re strummed.
Every single songwriter usually has a few stories about those guitarists that they will stand by through thick and thin because of what they’ve used them on. Willie Nelson would always stand by ‘Trigger’ for the rest of his life thanks to what it’s done for him, and even though Eddie Van Halen created a guitar institution by the time he passed away, there’s a reason why that signature Frankenstein guitar was always going to be legendary no matter how many knockoffs people tried to make.
Certain guitars just have the mojo about them, but Young knew it was about the player behind them that made all the difference. Johnny Cash could have made any guitar sound great with that thick baritone leading the charge, and any instrument that Jimi Hendrix ever touched would end up sounding like it was being touched by some musical god whenever he performed his signature tunes.
So by that metric, playing Hank Williams’s guitar would have been a bit easier for a rock and roller, right? Wrong. Sure, Williams would have been a legend of the country community at this point, but for anyone that knew the first thing about songwriting, the guitar that he used throughout his career would have been enough to reduce anyone to a shaky mess if they even saw it in public.
And while Young did end up with the guitar in his possession, he wasn’t about to stick it in a museum and make everyone gawk at it, either, saying, “[The seller] didn’t want anybody to take it if they didn’t know what it was. And then I had to buy it. It was a good guitar. It plays really well. I’ve been using it. I know some people think I shouldn’t, because it’s Hank Williams’ guitar, but I think it’s made to play. I get a lot out of it.”
Looking at it, it looks like any other Martin guitar from back in the day, but after Williams passed away, it practically comes to life in Young’s hands. The whole thing was made for the singer-songwriter genre, and whether it’s something baked into the wood or the way that neck moves, the whole thing feels like a piece of history in his hands whenever he performs with it.
Then again, it’s not like it isn’t already a museum piece in a sense. This is the same guitar that people would have recognised from songs like ‘Lost Highway’, and while Young was the first person to say that he wasn’t looking to eclipse what Williams had done on that guitar, he was willing to maybe harness a little bit of that mojo when he was writing about the same slice-of-life songs that he was always great at.
Because while country may have been where the whole thing originated, Young never felt the need to keep himself in one genre for the rest of his life. Instruments are like different paints for an artist to use whenever they make a record, but rarely does any guitar manage to leave a unique thumbprint whenever it’s played like Williams’s old guitar.
