"Shortly before his fiftieth birthday, baggage handlers destroyed Tim Brookes's guitar, his traveling companion of twenty-two years. His wife promised on the spot to replace it with the guitar of his dreams, but Tim discovered that a dream guitar is built, not bought." "He set out to find someone to make him the perfect guitar - a quest that ended up a dirt road in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where an amiable curmudgeon master-guitar-maker, Rick Davis, took a rare piece of cherry wood and went to work with saws, rasps, and files." "When Tim wasn't breathing over Rick's shoulder, he was trying to unravel the symbolic associations a guitar holds for so many of us, musicians and nonmusicians alike. His quest took him across the country, talking to historians, curators, guitar makers, and guitarists." "Arriving with conquistadors and the colonists, the guitar has been in an extraordinary variety of hands: those of miners and society ladies, lumberjacks and presidents' wives, Hawaiians, African-Americans, Cajuns, spiritualists, communists, and singing cowboys of the silver screen. Inventors and crackpots tinkered with it, introduced electricity, and a humble folk instrument became the basis of a musical revolution. In time it became America's instrument, and the rhythm of its sound track."--BOOK JACKET.