The Folk Boom
Hey! I can tell you with absolute certainly about the 'folk boom' - because I was there. Hell! I started the whole thing rolling. Met this kid one day back in the late 30's, maybe early 40's name Pete Seeger. He was only into swing and jazz and I turned his head around by playing....uh, yeah, it was a tune Seeger would later claim to write. I played a bunch of things for him - House of the Slidding Sons, This Plane is Bound for Stories, This Hand is Your Hand. Then this Seeger kid shows up a few years later and he's inspired a whole bunch of others to adopt communism and play acoustic guitars. Pretty soon, the whole village is playing acoustics and you got a bunch of 18-year olds with no world-vision telling the rest of the world how to do everything. There were so many of the buggers that they had to form groups just to get jobs to make money to share - yeah! remember they were all communist by now. Big groups - the New Crunchy Minstrels and so on. Then, some of 'em got TV shows and the whole thing blew wide open.
Of course, I didn't care because I had already moved over to found the 'new' singer/songwriter revolution.....
OK - seriously, I WAS there - though youngish. Even in it's hey-day, Guilds were not as visible as were Martins and Gibsons. However, when a group wanted to use a 12-string - they were almost always Guilds. Tim Buckley played a Guild 12, and so did Barry McGuire (Eve of Destruction) with the New Christy Minstrels and solo. I saw Harry Chapin playing Guilds for a time in the early 70's; Dave Van Ronk, Tom Smothers, John Denver, John Renbourne, Richie Havens (of course), Paul Simon (in the good ole' day), Bruce Cockburn still plays a Guild F112, Tom Fogerty of Creedence, Zally in the Spoonful, Dewey Bunnel of America played a Guild 12, now you can see Tom Petty and others, as it seems that Guild 12s are still looked at by those in the know as the best.
But, that's just it. When I was in high school in the late 60's and early 70's, Danny Guidry - who was the guitarist to watch in those days - said that everyone played Martins because ..well, because everyone played them and you wanted to be part of everyone. Strangely, that made sense to me and sent me running the other way when I started listening to the Martins being played in coffeehouses. But like it or not, Guilds weren't the 'common' and perhaps that's what makes us here so passionate - we're part of something that defies 'the common'.
Hey - I was part of that folk boom - that acoustic rebellion. Everywhere you went, there were acoustic instruments and people singing and playing. But whenever I took my Guild in, the response was ALWAYS the same...."Wow! a Guild - mind if I play it a bit?" dbs