To meet Freeman Vines is to meet America itself. An artist, a luthier and a spiritual philosopher, Vines’ life is a roadmap of the truths and contradictions of the American South. He remembers the hidden histories of the eastern North Carolina land on which his family has lived since enslavement. For over 50 years Vines has transformed materials culled from a forgotten landscape in his relentless pursuit of building a guitar capable of producing a singular tone that has haunted his dreams. From tobacco barns, mule troughs, and radio parts he has created hand-carved guitars, each instrument seasoned down to the grain by the echoes of its past life.
The following words are excerpts taken from over five years of interviews with Freeman Vines.
A person has to have a purpose to live.
Wood talks to me.
See, this wood is saying something right here.
Wood has a character.
Wood has a character, like the good cooks found out that food has a character.
Everything you do beside scratching yourself or combing you hair, everything you get involved with has a character of its own.
It may not be physical or spiritual, but it’s there.
Like that lawnmower has character.
You probably couldn’t mow no grass with it, but I can.
Because I know it.
You already know that.
I’m a fool.
Anybody got some old wood with some type of character, like a root, stuff like that intrigues me.
I can’t stand for them not to sell it to me.
They can find some old plank from those old mills around here and man I had to have it.
It’s hard to explain what it is,
and maybe it’s a feeling.
But it’s tone.
You’ve got to be in a pre-meditation stage to experience it.
If you ever notice—
the oak tree stays an oak,
a pine stays a pine.
A man is the most destructive, evilest thing,
that’s ever been.
Know how I know?
I’m one.
They did it because they were mean.
They wanted you to do the work,
but they didn’t want you to be a man.
The “yes sir,” that’s what they wanted.
Generations of people have changed. things ain’t changed.
Some hatred and animosity as they always had.
I went to Mr. Jefferson because a guy told me Mr. Jeffereson had wood.
And he said,
”Vines, I’m gonna tell you now. You’re black and I’m white.
That wood there came off a hanging tree.”
I said,
“I don’t believe that.”
He said,
“I don’t give a damn what you believe.
They used to hang people off that tree,”
He said that wood was over a hundred years old.
He died later on.
So that was part of the truth.
The other part I don’t know.
Everyone in a while you’ll see an old black person that’ll say,
“I know about it, man,
but don’t tell them white folks I told you.”
And that’s the way it goes.
So I made a few instruments out of it.
I made two, maybe three. I don’t know how many.
Mr. Jefferson told the truth. He lived to be more than ninety years old.
Fine fellow.
As we said a while ago, if you’re a snake, don’t try to pretend you’re not.
