Four of Music’s Most Iconic Acoustic Guitars

Electric guitars usually get all the glory when it comes to the world’s most famous guitars. From Jimi’s Strat to the other Jimmy’s double-neck SG, the Internet’s generic “most iconic guitar” listicles are packed to the brim with guitars that make nary a sound when you cut the cord.

We get it: Electric guitars are cool, exciting, and generally more immediately eye-catching than the standard acoustic. “Iconic” instruments need visual star power, and the typical hollow wooden box looks quaint compared to the double devil horns of Angus Young’s SG or whatever this thing is supposed to be.

Still, while acoustic guitars might not be the flashiest instruments, they’re equally important in shaping musical history and just as deserving of our awe and admiration! To celebrate the other side of the six-string coin, here are four of history’s most famous acoustic guitars.

Willie Nelson’s Martin N-20 “Trigger”

It simply doesn’t get any more iconic than Willie Nelson’s battle-scarred 1969 Martin N-20, better known as Trigger. The man and the guitar have been inseparable for over a half century, and its snappy plectrum-on-nylon-string tone is as much a part of Willie’s sound as his own breathy drawl.

In 1969, Willie’s main six-string was accidentally demolished by a drunk onstage. When he took it in for repair, the luthier declared the instrument past the point of no return. Instead, the luthier suggested Willie buy a brand-new Martin N-20 he had in stock, a nylon-string guitar in the classical style. This may seem like a somewhat odd recommendation for a country star — but stranger still is the reason for Willie’s nylon-string proclivity.

Steel-string acoustics are the quintessential country guitar, but Willie’s taste extends far beyond the typical cowboy crooner. He was a staunch devotee to the gypsy-jazz school of Django Reinhardt, regularly infusing the twang of his solos and licks with a touch of jazz sophistication. So, to emulate Django’s tone, Willie shunned the steel string and opted for a classical-style nylon instead. That makes sense, right? Well, not really. Django did not, in fact, even play a nylon-string guitar, although his Selmer steel-string guitar was no standard dreadnought. Regardless, Willie must have found something in the N-20 that resembled the quick attack and short decay of Django’s fleet-fingered virtuosity. Who are we to argue with Willie Nelson anyway?

Now, Willie may have favored nylon-string guitars, but his style is, well, less refined than your typical classical guitarist. Instead of gently plucking the strings with flesh or fingernail, Willie prefers the sharp immediacy of a plectrum. Unfortunately for Trigger, classical guitars aren’t really built to withstand a redheaded Texan outlaw beating on the top with a pick — the guitar soon developed a second soundhole where Willie’s pick hit the top.

It’s been there since the early ’70s, growing ever larger and regularly requiring re-lacquering and splints so that the instrument doesn’t fall to pieces. Still, Willie adamantly refuses to add a pickguard or to adopt a less energetic strumming style. Willie’s philosophy behind Trigger’s decayed condition is that his instrument matches him: as Willie’s voice grows more gravelly with time, Trigger’s worn-down frets (still original to the instrument), pockmarked body, and battered soundboard age right along with him.

While the Martin N-20 is a long-discontinued model, Sweetwater carries various electronics-equipped acoustics if you want to strum through a few of the redheaded stranger’s classics. And, as cool as Trigger’s wear is, might we suggest a pickguard?

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Kurt Cobain’s Martin D-18E

What’s the most expensive guitar ever sold? Jimi Hendrix’s white Strat? David Gilmour’s black Strat? Peter Green’s Les Paul? As of this article’s publication, the record for the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction is Kurt Cobain’s 1959 Martin D-18E, bringing in a whopping six million dollars.

The story goes that Kurt picked up this guitar in Los Angeles a few months before recording Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York performance. Unplugged offered Kurt an opportunity to present his songs with a highly personal and stripped-down approach, swapping the crushing guitars for the not-so-gentle strum of his D-18E. It’s an intimate concert, and — considering the album’s funereal atmosphere, raw vocal performances, and posthumous release — it served both as a memorial and as a celebration for the ’90s’ most influential songwriter. While Kurt didn’t use the guitar on any of his main studio albums, the image of him chugging away on his D-18E was etched into the minds of an entire generation of Nirvana fans, surely making it one of the most famous acoustics in history.

As you might see in the video, this is no ordinary acoustic-electric — two DeArmond pickups are mounted directly to the top of the guitar along with a trio of knobs and a pickup selector switch. All this hardware weighing down the top didn’t exactly result in an instrument with an open and responsive voice. Even worse, the electronics didn’t function very well with bronze strings, an issue that Kurt remedied with a more modern aftermarket pickup. By all accounts, it wasn’t a particularly successful design, and Martin appeared to agree — making very few of these early acoustic-electric experiments only for a single year. In the typical, irreverent Cobain fashion, the fact that it was a weird, unwanted guitar likely drew Kurt in more than anything else. We can’t help but imagine that he’d love the idea that this eccentric acoustic has become the most expensive guitar on the planet!

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John Lennon’s Gibson J-160E

Speaking of strange early acoustic-electric experiments, the Gibson J-160E theoretically shares much in common with the D-18E. Still, it found far more success with an up-and-coming young British band in the early ’60s: the Beatles. In 1962, the then-unknown duo of John Lennon and George Harrison was gifted nearly identical Gibson J-160E guitars by their manager Brian Epstein to use on their first studio album, Please Please Me.

By all accounts, George liked his J-160E just fine, but it became an indispensable creative tool for John. Many of the Beatles’ early hits were supposedly written on this guitar, including their first #1, “Love Me Do.” Moreover, many Beatles fanatics are surprised to learn that several of John’s electric tracks on the band’s first two albums were not, in fact, his Rickenbacker 325 but the plugged-in tones of his J-160E.

In fact, a combination of a primarily laminate body, ladder bracing, and an uncovered P-90 pickup made the J-160E far more suited to being a full-on electric than an “acoustic-electric” in the way that we think of them today, especially when plugged into a cranked Vox amp! The body’s tendency to swell with feedback at loud volumes was actually used to the band’s advantage at the beginning of their song “I Feel Fine,” one of the first recorded intentional uses of feedback in music history.

Famously, John’s J-160E was lost in 1963, left behind by roadie Mal Evans after playing a show in London. The guitar went through a few different owners — none of whom realized its importance — until the man who had purchased it from a friend in 1969 read through a Guitar Aficionado magazine featuring George’s matching J-160E and found the two guitars’ serial numbers to be suspiciously close. A bit of investigation revealed that it was, in fact, John’s original J-160E, and the man’s $175 purchase sold at auction for 2.41 million dollars. In a move that we’re sure John would approve of, half the profit went to Yoko Ono, who subsequently donated the entirety of her proceeds to her charity, the Spirit Foundation.

Clarence White and Tony Rice’s Martin D-28

If the word “bluegrass” sounds more to you like something growing in your yard than a style of music, then there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of either Clarence White or Tony Rice, much less the Martin they shared. However, for any guitarist that’s played a G-run or fiddle tune, this particular herringbone D-28 is the holy grail instrument of all acoustic guitars with a story and a pedigree to match its fame.

The White/Rice Martin D-28 began life in 1935 and, somewhere between then and 1959, managed to find itself half dead inside a Los Angeles pawnshop. The soundhole was poorly whittled out to the rosette; the fingerboard was held on by tape; the pickguard was holding on for dear life; but 15-year-old Clarence White thought paying $25 for an old Martin was an enticing prospect.

Upon bringing it home, Clarence’s father essentially told him it was garbage, but a local luthier named Milt Owen saw things differently. He slapped on a bound fingerboard from an old Gretsch, put some strings on it, and brought the old box back to life. It would serve as Clarence’s main guitar for the next six years as he quickly became one of his generation’s most prominent bluegrass guitarists with a legacy that still stands tall to this day.

During this time, a 9-year-old Tony Rice — a fellow guitarist playing in a family bluegrass band — encountered the D-28 backstage at a radio show. Clarence let him noodle around on the guitar, and the impression it left on Tony was large, almost as large as the distance between the strings and fingerboard, which Tony remembers as being dangerously close to half an inch! A combination of the D-28’s declining playability and the rise of the electric guitar caused Clarence to give up his Martin in 1965 — but not before shooting it with a pellet gun in a fit of high action–induced rage.

The Byrds circa 1970 with Clarence White, second from the right.

Clarence White went on to join the famous ’60s folk-rock group the Byrds, co-invent the B-bender with fellow Byrd Gene Parsons, and then make his way back to the bluegrass scene in the early ’70s. Tragically, his incredible career was cut short at the age of 29 when he was stricken by a drunk driver.

By this time, Tony was in his early twenties and quickly developing his own formidable bluegrass voice. Clarence’s musical influence loomed heavy in his mind, and, two years after his idol’s death, Tony began to seek the D-28 that Clarence let him play backstage so many years ago. Tony quickly tracked it down to the man Clarence had sold it to in 1965 and discovered that the guitar had essentially been unplayed for the last nine or so years. He took a plane, bought it, and promptly used it on a session within hours of his purchase. It’s hard to overstate how incredible the whole event was — it would be like Stevie Ray Vaughan tracking down Jimi Hendrix’s Strat or like Joe Pass stumbling across Charlie Christian’s ES-150. Tony himself couldn’t believe it, telling the Fretboard Journal in 2016, “I kept waiting to wake up... for days I was thinking, ‘It couldn’t possibly have been this easy.'”

As monumental as Clarence White was in the early-’60s bluegrass scene, Tony Rice spent the next half century or so matching, and eventually surpassing, him. For many bluegrass fans, Tony Rice is the guitarist to beat; he revolutionized the dusty, old genre by organically incorporating jazz and classical music elements into his rustic bluegrass chops. David Grisman, Bela Fleck, Jerry Garcia, Norman Blake, Ricky Skaggs — reading off a list of Rice’s collaborations is essentially a who’s who of the folk, country, and bluegrass music worlds. All the while, this legendary herringbone D-28 was at his side until his passing in 2020.

Later in life, Tony would often play replicas of his favorite D-28 to save the original from the rigors of the road.

This guitar has developed such a mythical status among bluegrass aficionados that it’s been endlessly measured, copied, and re-created by dozens of boutique builders. Still, it’s hard to authentically capture the wear and tear of close to a century’s worth of hard living. It’s been shot with a pellet gun, run over by a car, and submerged in water for the better part of an hour, but the Clarence White/Tony Rice D-28 is more than a survivor — it’s one of the most legendary instruments of all time.

Shop Martin’s current D-28 offerings

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Looking to Make Acoustic History?

So, how do these four acoustic guitars fare against the legions of iconic electrics out there? While we might not carry many identical copies of these idiosyncratic instruments, Sweetwater’s massive selection of acoustic and acoustic-electric guitars contains hundreds of guitars that are all but guaranteed to capture the vibe and tone of Willie Nelson, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, and Clarence White/Tony Rice’s favorite acoustics. If you’re looking for a new guitar to help you make your acoustic history, then give your Sweetwater Sales Engineer a call at (800) 222-4700 to get your own brand-new six-string!
The post Four of Music’s Most Iconic Acoustic Guitars appeared first on inSync.