I built my first acoustic guitar in year 2000, at the age of 41. Although the path to get to that point was long, arduous, and full of detours, that first experience of hands-on lutherie was the single most profound chapter of my life. Now, some fourteen years into the Craft, I can’t imagine doing anything else for a living. I think this is why I was born. All of my lifetime learning and experience up to this point seemed to coalesce around the practice of guitar lutherie.

   I earned my BA degree in Fine Arts at Towson University, near Baltimore, MD in 1982. For the next fifteen years, I made my living in Commercial and Fine Art photography, with a few stints as a carpenter mixed in, working mostly in house building and home improvement. As much as I loved photography, it was a hard way to make a living.   Exhausted and dispirited after fifteen years of swimming against the current, I gave it up, just as the Digital Revolution was beginning to overwhelm traditional analog photography.

  

   In the mid- 80s, I became fascinated with the design and construction of guitars, and began to seek out whatever information I could find about the mysterious arcana of the Art and Craft of Lutherie. Over time, I began to assemble my own ideas and theories about how to improve the form and function of the acoustic guitar. I knew I wanted to learn the Craft, but I had no access to a shop, and no money to pay for a formal course in guitar making.

   Then, in 1999, a highly improbable sequence of events came together in brilliant synchronicity, profoundly changing the course of the rest of my life. I had decided to take the Amtrak down to Healdsburg, California, and attend the Healdsburg Guitar Festival. It was sort of a spiritual pilgrimage for me. I had not booked a room, or other accommodations there; I had no idea where I was going to stay during the four-day festival. I figured I’d just pitch my tent on the first available patch of dirt I could find, and hope for the best.

   As it happened, ten minutes after I arrived at the Luthiers Mercantile in Healdsburg to pick up my event tickets, standing in the parking lot of LMI, I met Bill Hall,  the brother of Leslie Hall, who was the lead Festival organizer. Bill, my new best friend, like some kind of mercenary guardian angel, got  me an invitation to pitch my tent in Leslie’s BACK YARD for the whole weekend. Six other people, mostly luthiers, were also camping out at Leslie’s house, so it was a never-ending party. Amazingly, miraculously, I had landed right PLUNK in the nucleus of the Healdsburg Guitar Festival inner sanctum! It was kismet...

   I volunteered my services as gopher, roadie, and beast-of-burden, and that got me a pass into every event during the long weekend. I was thrilled beyond words! Here I was, in the center of the acoustic guitar universe, surrounded by the best luthiers and the finest guitars on the planet. Feathery tickle of fate!

   Ervin was very generous with his time, and we had a lengthy conversation. At one point, I told him it was my greatest ambition to try my hand at guitar making, and he replied with these magic words:

“Look, if you are meant to become a luthier, it WILL happen. And WHEN it does, I want to see your work”.

   Somehow, that felt like both a blessing  and a challenge. Now I HAD to find a way.

   I came back home to Seattle after the Festival, lit afire with the burning ambition to build guitars. But I still had no idea how it was going to happen. But then, that inexplicable serendipity came around again a few days later, when a friend introduced me to Aaron Andrews, who just happened to be a local luthier and pro guitar tech...

  ( This is Aaron in the photo below, doing some design work, while Chet, the shop superintendent, takes a cat nap.)

   Turns out, oddly enough, a large house with attached shop space came available for rent in the University District. Aaron and the rest of the crew decided to move there, and Aaron asked me if I would be interested in joining their ragtag crew. Of course it was Kismet. Fate. Whatever you want to call it; my DREAM was coalescing into reality.

    Cut to the chase: We moved into the house and shop space on Roosevelt Way on June first, 2000. Aaron and I set up a clunky but workable guitar shop, and before you know it, I was busy building my very first guitar, under Aaron’s patient and detailed guidance.

   When events line up with such astounding perfection as that, how could I NOT think that this was fated to be?

   I still had a “real” job during my first eight years at the Roosevelt house, but I kept building guitars in the evenings, weekends, and vacations, working alongside Aaron, and some other people who came in from time to time. It was the best time of my life. Quite literally, it was a dream come true. I was in luthier boot camp!   

   And our shop became a social hub in the district, for artists, musicians, and all kinds of other interesting, eclectic, scruffy characters. Never a dull moment.

   Of course, Ervin Somogyi was there, with his wizardly instruments on display. I approached him again, and showed him my first guitar. He actually remembered me from the ’99 show. He said, “You DID it!”

   He gave my guitar a few minutes of close scrutiny. He was not very impressed with my somewhat, um,  rustic aesthetic treatment, but he commented very positively on the sound and tone quality, and the playability. Then, he bestowed upon me another magical blessing. He said,

                           “I believe if you keep at it, you may have a future in this work...”

That’s the Grand Master himself, Ervin Somogyi, in the photo above, giving a lecture on soundboard bracing and tuning, at the 2009 Healdsburg Guitar Festival. He’s one of the most eloquent  and engaging professors you could ever hope to meet.

(Pause...)

   A lot of water has gone under the bridge since those days. In February 2008, after I had survived six rounds of layoffs at my “real” job, my long-time employer finally collapsed into bankruptcy. I was one of the last rats to leave the sinking ship, shoved off the gang plank with no severance, no savings, and no prospects.

   I hadn’t made any serious effort to market any of the guitars I had made in my spare time. I had given away the first two to friends, and made a few on commission, but I was not on the Luthier radar screen. I had no website, no reputation, no name recognition, and now, no source of income; but I did have a bunch of guitars that I’d built, sitting quietly in their cases in the back room... I thought maybe if I roped them all together, they might make a serviceable life raft to float me away from the shipwreck of my paycheck job. If I could only figure out how to sell them...

   Soon, I decided to take my first prototype Consort Cutaway guitar out on a cold-call visit to the Guitar Emporium, a high-end acoustic guitar store in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. I walked into the store and nervously introduced myself to the proprietor, Robb Eagle, describing myself as a local luthier, and asked him if he’d be willing to have a look at this guitar and give me his opinion...

                                                                                                                              awaiting his verdict.

   Finally, Robb gently laid the guitar back in its case, looked me straight in the eye, and said,

“Two questions: One, who the hell are you, and two, where the hell have you been hiding?”

   At first, I thought Robb was a little peeved, but when I GOT what he was saying, I could feel the sudden turn of my fortunes, coming back around toward that same serendipity that had visited me in the past so many times.

   I wound up hanging out with Robb in his store for the rest of the afternoon, and we began what has become a long and prospering friendship.

   Finally, he said, “If your other guitars are this nice, I’ll take everything you’ve got, on consignment...”

   EUREKA! I was IN!

   Soon after, my guitars began to sell, one after another. Robb would call me up and say, “Bad news: I sold another one.” Then commissions began rolling in. I bought a new iMac computer, and cobbled together my first website. I bought new tools, and increased my wood stash. Suddenly, I was better off financially than I had ever been, working for THE MAN.

   And I was doing the thing I most wanted to do IN THE WORLD.

   This all happened in early 2008. Just as I was beginning to gain some traction as a self-employed, custom guitar luthier, the American economy collapsed absurdly and ridiculously into ruin.  Giant financial institutions toppling like dominoes, millions of people losing their jobs, their homes...

   And here I was, trying to make a living building high-dollar, non-essential objects of luxury, in the worst economy since the Great Depression. What a great time to be starting such an improbable enterprise as this!

   The economy began to slowly, painfully  inch toward recovery. My client list began to grow. The guitars continued to evolve, and my skills continued to develop.

   Now, it looks like I’m in this profession for the long haul.

  By 2012, the lives of all of us at the Roosevelt Way house began to diverge. Aaron had gotten married, and he and Lisa bought a house out in West Seattle. He still came in to the Roosevelt shop every day, but was in the process of converting his outbuilding at home into a new guitar shop. The space we’d shared for twelve years was falling into crumbling decrepitude, and the landlord refused to fix anything. It was finally time to move out and move on, after twelve extraordinary years of adventure.

   My Mother and Father, who live in Birmingham, Alabama, were having some health difficulties, and facing the prospect of having to sell the house and move into an assisted living community. Since I have a portable job, and nothing major tying me down, I decided to move to Birmingham, set up my guitar atelier in Dad’’s home workshop, and be there when my folks need help.

   My Mom has been a professional potter and ceramic artist for years. She is very talented in other creative arts as well, not the least of which is, she’s a Master culinary artist. She’s a force of nature!

   Dad retired early, and set up a home workshop, and proceeded to fill his house with masterpiece furniture of his own design and construction. Dad’s output for twenty five years was prodigious. Every room in the house has a suite of Masterpiece, heirloom quality furniture that he designed and built.

   Both of my parents have far more than the usual allotment of creative talent.

   My guitar brand is Edwinson, because my Dad, Edwin, is a genius of Fine Woodworking, and I am his son. Dad isn’t working anymore, but he’s thrilled that I am making guitars in his shop. There’s an elegant twist of circumstance for you!

   And that brings the story up to the present day.

   And as to the future...?

   I look forward to teaching opportunities as well. I would love to share what I know with aspiring luthiers, and do whatever I can to pass on the Craft Wisdom.  Perhaps I will even write a book about guitar making, if there are enough hours in the day.

   I am going to keep building Edwinson guitars until I can no longer lift a chisel. I figure I’ve probably got twenty-five, maybe thirty good years of quality work left in me. We’ll see what fortune brings. I won’t say my life has ever been easy, but I can say with unequivocal assurance that my life has been blessed with grace and good fortune. I’m going to do whatever it takes to keep it going. I love this work, down to the core of my bones, and that is a gift of incomparable value.

   The Edwinson brand name is an homage to my Father, Mr. Edwin Sheriff. Dad is a Master of Fine Woodworking, now retired. His artistry, craft wisdom, and pure genius are peerless and magnificent, and I shall always aspire to emulate his example. After all he is Edwin, and I’m his son.

Steve, the Edwinson    November 2013

  

My Dad, Mr. Edwin Sheriff, November 2009