Metro Pulse/Cover/The Music Issue

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Guitar Man

Why Do You Play?
Local singers, songwriters and musicians of all kinds tell us what makes them make music.

Independents' Day
Local DIY labels run on love, not money

Bo Knows Music
Roderick Wisdom was there when Bob Ritchie became Kid Rock

Just In It for the Music
Brainchild of musical wunderkind Wendel Werner, this all-woman jazz choir has just arrived on the local scene — but it's already setting its sights abroad.

Johnny rushing doesn't just make music — he makes the instruments, too.

by Mike Gibson

Johnny Rushing makes guitars better than he plays them, but that's no knock on his musicianship.

Despite sturdy workman's fingers, digits that look thick enough to extract nails from oaken blocks, Rushing rolls gospel standards and quicksilver bluegrass and country breakdowns off the strings of his six-string acoustic with the sort of facile certainty that only the gifted possess.

But the almost serpentine "R" on the headstock of his axe, a personalized logo composed of inordinately curving lines and a bold northward hook shooting off from the letter's upper left corner, speaks to where the Seymour resident's greatest talents lie. The "R" is for Rushing, of course, and the guitar is of his own making, a spruce-and-rosewood beauty trimmed in silvery pearl and abalone, an inlaid pearl vine snaking the length of the fretboard.

"I figure if you've got a good guitar, you only need one," Rushing says. It is the only one he's made that isn't for sale. On a Tuesday evening at the end of a long day's work, Rushing is picking and grinning—with a broad smile that pushes his cheeks out like those of a cherubic cheshire cat—in the homey, earth-toned living room of his residence, the home of Rushing Guitars.

Rushing says he's happy here, happier than he's ever been in his life. A family man with a wife, Donna, and three children, one of them grown, the moon-faced Louisiana native spent most of his adult life toiling in deep-South railyards before finding a home for his preferred trade here in the foothills of Appalachia.

East Tennessee musicians have heard about Rushing's skill. He's built or fixed guitars, dobros and mandolins for members of the Cox Family and the Lonesome River Band, for studio musicians and members of Dolly Parton's band, including Dolly herself. A piece of his handiwork, a hand-made mandolin, was featured in the Coen Brothers' movie hit O Brother, Where Art Thou?

"I'm a bluegrass nut, so I'd always wanted to come to East Tennessee," Rushing says. "When I finally visited, I instantly knew this is where I needed to be, up here with the pickers."

A full-time luthier (guitar-maker) for less than three years, Rushing began crafting his own instruments more than 30 years ago. The son of a New Orleans railroad man—a conductor who played jazz music on the side—Rushing learned his first chords when he was 10 years old, but he had to share playing time on the family's only guitar with his father as well as a twin brother, Jimmy.

At 13, Rushing found a beaten old Stella acoustic at a garage sale, and re-worked it into playing shape with only common sense and his player's feel as guide. The renovation was successful, and Rushing soon thereafter felt some inexplicable call to build an instrument whole from raw materials. His methods were almost unthinkably crude, Rushing admits. He fashioned the body from walnut, giving the sides their needed curvature through a tedious process of boiling the wood, then bending it. The neck he carved from a mahogany board with an ordinary whittling knife. The finished product was homely, asymmetrical, less-than-sonorous—yet still functional.

"It was decided for me then," Rushing says. "Who knows why the bug gets you? All I knew was that I loved it; I loved the music, the instruments, the people involved with it. I didn't fish; I didn't hunt; I built and fixed guitars. It was recreation for me."

Rushing followed his father and took a job with the railroad, but spent large portions of his spare time fixing instruments; he became known among friends as "the guitar doctor," and he says now without a trace of arrogance, "I haven't seen yet the instrument I can't fix."

Then in 1975, on a visit to brother Jimmy's home, Rushing unveiled his sixth completed guitar. The aesthetics of the instrument were still much less than ideal. But when Jimmy strummed a chord, Rushing said it was clear this instrument was heir to the sonic riches denied its earlier and cruder brethren.

"Jimmy lifted his eyes from the fretboard and said, 'Wow, you make this look like a guitar and you'll have something!'" Rushing laughs. "That was as close to a compliment as Jimmy ever gets. I knew that I'd turned a corner."

The physical science of guitars is daunting, and even though Rushing has never had any relevant formal schooling, he understands more about applied physics than most engineers. His knowledge is empirical, gained through years of research and fueled by singular tenacity and an unfettered enthusiasm. He notes that becoming an accomplished luthier has much to do with persistence: "It's not so much the skills when you start; it's the willingness to put in the effort."

Rushing's efforts are expended today in his garage, a prosaic and suburban sort of carport transformed by dint of strange tools and molds and an overabundance of sawdust. The shelves and cupboards—all of them handmade—that line the walls hold guitars in all stages of development.

The guitar is a soundbox, Rushing explains, thumping the unvarnished surface of a work-in-progress. The top layer of soft wood, the portion beneath the strings, is a soundboard. It breathes, moves and reverberates in concert with the energy of the vibrating strings. The rest of the guitar amplifies that sound, channeling it through the box's tailored curvatures and forcing it out through the soundhole.

The character of the sound is determined by any number of factors: by the type or thickness of the woods; by the size or conformation of the box; and of course by the properties of the six strings pulled taut over the soundhole.

"I could get real deep, explaining all the physical properties, but the point is that if you know what kind of sound you want, it can be designed into the body," Rushing says. "It's all logarithms and trigonometry; there's a lot of hidden knowledge behind this crap."

But perhaps the luthier's greatest asset is his capacity for mechanical creativity. Many of the tools used to bend reluctant materials to the will of the luthier are mutant, personalized, unfamiliar to the shelves of any hardware store. Craftsmen called them "jigs," a broadly-applied bit of slang terminology that applies as well to any such home-tailored gadget.

"This one has a patented Thomas Edison heating element," Rushing joshes, peeling a thin sheet of metal from the side of one of his own creations to reveal a row of light bulbs. The gadget is a side-bender, used to fashion the guitar's trademark hourglass shape; the bulbs serve to heat an overlaid section of wood to the point of its relative malleability.

Mark Campbell, a Knoxville-area musician who worked for a time in a Nashville guitar factory, now works as Rushing's assistant, and speaks admiringly of his mentor's singular ingenuity in jig-making. "A lot of the stuff they used in the factory, Johnny came up with on his own," Campbell says.

"You can't pick this stuff up in Sears and Roebuck, and the manufacturers sure aren't going to sell you any models," Rushing says. "You have to be creative and figure out new ways of doing things. It's common sense. Folks have been building guitars for a long time without electronic instruments. They used their noodle."

Rushing took his craft to another level of accomplishment after the building of that magical sixth guitar. Brother Jimmy, a draftsman by trade, helped by researching the spatial requisites of guitar-making, and by forging some of the molds and templates Johnny would later employ. Johnny built more than 500 acoustic guitars in the ensuing quarter-century, a prodigious output given that most full-time luthiers rarely build more than 15 instruments in a year. But his larger aspiration remained unfulfilled, shackled by what Rushing characterizes as a poor market for quality handmade instruments in southern Louisiana.

But three years ago, shortly after Rushing's retirement from the railroad, his regional reputation as a first-rate luthier seized the attention of someone at Pigeon Forge's Dollywood amusement park. Rushing accepted an invitation to set up shop inside the park through the month of October as part of Dollywood's annual Harvest Celebration. Plying his trade for the edification of park visitors, and surrounded by a bevy of talented country and bluegrass instrumentalists, Rushing found the actualization he had long sought and moved to Seymour soon thereafter.

"It was a life-changing event," Rushing remembers. "Dollywood bent over backwards for me, set me up a shop with benches and everything right in the middle of the park. The market is so much better up here; it's so easy to find people who are interested in the music, to find jam sessions. People are a lot more educated about acoustic instruments."

Today, as proprietor of Rushing Guitars, the Louisianan restores vintage instruments as well as building and fixing guitars; he's now a mainstay of the Dollywood Harvest Celebration.

There's a vibrant enthusiasm in Rushing's manner whenever he picks up an instrument he's just finished. On this afternoon, he brandishes a sleek new blonde six-string with a slender headstock, strumming accompaniment to an old gospel tune he sings in a surprisingly sweet tenor. "It's like rebuilding a car—when you get it done, you've got to run it around some, try it out," he laughs.

But in every instance, the new guitar finds a buyer (at an average price of about $2,200), and thus a new master, and its builder goes back without remorse to playing the pearl-trimmed instrument he constructed for his own permanent use some years ago. The luthier's passion, it would seem, has as much to do with passing the music along as it does with making it. Says Rushing, "There's something special about having your work out there, and with having other people out there who treasure it."