Hanging Tree Guitars
by Freeman Vines with Zoe van Buren, photography by Timothy Duffy
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"Part memoir, part photo essay, Hanging Tree Guitars is the story of North Carolina luthier Freeman Vines. He crafts guitars from found materials and hunks of old wood, including some from a tree once used for a lynching. Vines, 78, explains how the wood talks to him, and he reflects on growing up in a sharecropper’s family under Jim Crow. “I had learned that the white man was what controlled the code,” he says. Timothy Duffy’s tintype images of Vines and his guitars are stunning, including one where Vines is sitting in a field with his guitars strung on a frame overhead."
NPR Books We Love — 2020 · apps.npr.org