Here again is a curtain raiser for the (mostly) weekly Sunday Sanity version of my Sustain What webcast.
Paste this post link in your calendar for 10 a.m., Sunday, February 23, to watch three ways - on Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. The show also streams live to X/Twitter but there’s no advance livestream link.
Guests include Patrick Stanfield Jones, Laurie Siegel and Lydia Adams Davis from my old Hudson Valley crew, plus John Thomas, a Quinnipiac University Law School professor, guitarist, guitar collector and guitar historian.
We’ll discuss the new short documentary based on Thomas’s 2013 book Kalamazoo Gals: A Story of Extraordinary Women and Gibson's "Banner" Guitars of WWII. The book centers on the lives of some of the women who secretly kept building Gibson’s fabled instruments while the company shifted to wartime work.
Here’s the film trailer:
Here’s Thomas with one of the “Kalamazoo gals,” Irene Stearns, in the old Gibson factory.
It’s worth noting that I have a slightly younger Gibson, a Southern Jumbo made in 1949, that I bought in pieces for $35 when I was 17, visiting Halifax, Nova Scotia, as crew on a sailing team representing Rhode Island. When I got home, my dad was outraged that I’d spent $35 on a broken guitar and said he’d throw it out at the end of the summer if I didn’t fix it up. Great motivation, and it remains an incredible guitar. You’ll hear it Sunday!