Following is an excerpt from the August 1997 issue of Acoustic Guitar Magazine which profiled five custom acoustic guitar builders.

The two-room barn next to Marty Lanham's house in Nashville is filled with stacks of wood he's collected over the past 20 years. In his workroom hang the bodies of three freshly finished guitars, one of which will be first prize at the Cross Country Trail Ride in Eminence, Missouri. Holly Tashian's Martin waits in its case for a fine-tuning before accompanying her on a European road trip. On the walls, photographs of bluegrass icons such as Bill Monroe and Dave "Stringbean" Akeman share space with the Beatles, Albert King, and Paul Simon. Lanham points out one of his favorite photos, which shows a young Johnny Cash smiling and chatting with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.

Lanham's Nashville Guitar Company services some of acoustic music's most respected talents. He's made instruments for Pat Enright and Stuart Duncan of the Nashville Bluegrass Band, mainstream country artist and former bluegrasser Marty Stuart, and songwriter Dave Gibson, formerly of the Gibson-Miller Band - as well as doctors, lawyers, overseas collectors, and other part-time players, including actor/banjoist Steve Martin. Lanham has been a professional musician for the better part of the past three decades, and his guitars combine modern adaptability with a traditionalist's appreciation for acoustic instruments.

He got interested in instrument repair in 1964, when he brought a couple of his old Gibsons to a shop. "I took them to a place in San Francisco that was pretty reputable," he recalls. "When I got them back, I could see the guy's handprint in the glue on the back of the mandolin. I knew that I could do better work than that." As a teenager, Lanham had done plenty of gun-stock work, so he was no stranger to wood, and in the late '60's he began working on instruments for friends and colleagues he met playing bluegrass banjo in the San Francisco area.

In 1972, the members of Lanham's band, the Styx River Ferry, decided to move to Nashville. Lanham got a job in the repair shop of Gruhn Guitars, where he worked for eight years. "That's where the bulk of my knowledge of instruments and materials comes from -- the constant parade of the finest instruments in the world," he says. He also had the opportunity to work on Hank Williams' old Martin D-45, now owned by Marty Stuart, Lester Flatt's D-28, and two of Jimmie Rodgers' guitars - a Weymann and a Gibson HG-24. Still, Lanham's primary focus was on his musicianship, and he spent four years as banjoist at the Grand Ole Opry, playing with bluegrass legend Wilma Lee Cooper.

Lanham gradually began making his own instruments, and in 1985 he decided to devote himself full-time to business of lutherie. "The musicians of this community have shaped what I do," Lanham says. "I like to work on instruments for people who play professionally, who push the envelope and push the instruments to the maximum demands of the road. I think the thing that's unique about my instruments is not any one detail or feature, but the experience I bring to the workbench -- experience with musicians, and experience gained from being a musician myself."

Lanham's instruments are built with traditional tonewoods like rosewood and spruce as well as more unusual species like Tasmanian blackwood and Malagasy kingwood. "A big issue among instrument makers," he says, "is the supply of wood. We're all looking for alternative woods and a sustainable-yield wood supply. I've located some people who specialize in wood harvesting. There's a guy named Larry Trumble who seeks out individual trees in Alaska. There are a lot of trees, for instance, that were cut off about 15 feet above the ground, so there are all these 15-foot stumps."

How many hours does Lanham spend on an individual instrument? "I honestly don't know," he says. "I work in a more organic way, I guess. I spend a lot of time not just out here in the shop but doing R&D, you might say. The [musical] genre really determines the demands of each instrument. Bluegrass players are mostly traditional-minded. They want a big body with a big, boomy sound to be heard over all the other instruments in a bluegrass band. A songwriter like Dave Gibson -- who does a lot of demo recording, and generally plays electric on stage but likes to write with an acoustic -- wants a smaller body with a more focused sound."

Lanham confirms that his instruments have gotten better over the years. "Sure, there's been a progression," he says. " and there is a tremendous amount of information sharing -- good, accurate information -- within the instrument-building community. In the past five years or so, there has been a renaissance in the handmade instrument community. As a result, the craft as a whole has improved. We're all making better instruments than we did 20 years ago."

- Shelton Clark