Willie Nelson 2004

Willie Nelson 2004, hand-drawn holding his Martin N20 Classical Guitar “Trigger” inside his tour bus in Beverly Hills, California in 2004, age 71.

In 1969, Nelson and his band were playing at the John T. Floore Country Store, in Helotes, Texas, Willie remembers, and at some point he laid down his Baldwin acoustic guitar in its case on the stage. “A drunk stepped on it,” Willie says.
He had a couple of his guys take the guitar back to Nashville, to Shot Jackson, whom Willie had known since the early sixties.

The thing is, Willie didn’t much care about the guitar, an 800C Electric Classical, which had a thick, beefy neck.
The guitar had been a promotional gift from Baldwin—a piano company—in 1968, along with a C1 amp.
What Willie really liked was the sound he could get from the guitar’s pickup, a revolutionary Prismatone piezoelectronic model, made with six tiny ceramic sensors.

Jackson couldn’t salvage the guitar, he told Willie over the phone. It was too busted up. Jackson did mention, though, that he had a Martin N-20 on hand and could transfer the pickup into it.
Martin was the premier maker of steel-stringed guitars; the N-20, which had been introduced the year before, was a nylon-stringed, or gut-string, guitar, an attempt by Martin to make inroads in the Spanish-style market. Willie liked gut-string guitars well enough, but he was a little uncomfortable buying one over the phone. “Is it any good?” he asked. “Well, Martins are known for good guitars,” Jackson responded. Willie asked the price. Seven hundred and fifty dollars, Jackson told him.
“I had just bought a roping horse for seven hundred and fifty dollars,” Willie recalls. “So I said, ‘That’s pretty cool.’ ”

He bought it, sight unseen.

The guitar top is adorned with autographs.
Some were famous musicians: Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson; and others were members of Willie’s band or crew: Paul English, Poodie, Budrock Prewitt, and Tune’n Tom, a.k.a. Tom Hawkins, who had become the guitar’s caretaker on the road, changing strings every three or four gigs and tuning it up.
Some signed the guitar in Magic Marker or Sharpie, and their names were soon lost in the blood, sweat, and beers of the nightlife.
Others scratched them in with a ballpoint pen but didn’t push deep enough, and their names too slowly faded.
Soon Willie lost track of exactly who had signed his guitar.

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