Photograph courtesy of Kent Everett
Kent Everett picks up a thin piece of AAA-grade Sitka spruce cut into the shape of a guitar top and glides his hand across the smooth top. “Someone found a bunch of old salmon crates in Washington state that were supposedly salvaged out of the bottom of this river,” he says. “The guy didn’t know what to do with them, and then he found out they’d be perfect for building guitars. The wood was milled from virgin spruce in Alaska a century ago, and it has just exceptional grain.”
Everett quickly bought the wood because it was some of the best spruce he had ever seen, and just any kind of wood won’t do for an Everett acoustic guitar. With a base retail price starting at $3,400 and rising to $6,400, the Everett is one of the most praised and sought-after high-end instruments in the country. Sought-after because Kent Everett builds only 20 each year at his shop in north Atlanta, with orders backed up for one year. Praised because Everett makes a brand-new instrument that sounds old, as if it’s been played for years and broken in with a loving touch.
Photograph courtesy of Kent Everett
“The Everett is a superb instrument,” says Lary Vroido, who owns a guitar shop called Acoustic Roots outside of Philadelphia and is one of a handful of Everett dealers across the country. “Kent is a master builder.” Shawn Mullins plays an Everett. So do country star Brad Paisley and folk singer Matthew Kahler. The Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray owns three Everett guitars. “I saw the first one about six months after she bought it, and it looked like it’d been through a war,” Everett says with a slight cringe.
If he feels paternal, it’s understandable: He can spend two months and longer handcrafting each guitar that bears his name. “Every one of these guitars is different, every one has its own personality,” he says. “And when one of my guitars leaves here, it’s like I’ve written the first chapter. See, you’re building something that will be living and breathing for years to come. From here, it begins its life.”
The Everett guitar “factory” is actually a cramped house that is so nondescript there’s not even a shingle outside announcing its presence. The only giveaway is a secret code to those who need to know: a tiny green plywood cutout of a guitar that hangs by the front door.
There is a room in the house devoted to each stage of the guitar-building process. The life cycle of the instrument begins in an old workroom in the back that is kept at a constant humidity of 45 percent. On the shelves are the individual pieces that will become future Everett models: fingerboards of ebony, necks of mahogany, guitar-shaped cut-outs of Indian rosewood for the backs, thin pieces of spruce and Western red cedar for the tops. Everett picks up a sheet of spruce, grasps it with both hands and flexes it up and down. “The tone of the guitar depends on the wood for the top,” he says. “If you have a really bouncy top like this, you put it on a smaller body because it needs more bass, more air flow. You use a stiffer top for bigger guitars because it already has bass; it needs more treble and top-end.”
Curing is just the first step of the process. There’s a room where he cuts and shapes the raw wood. There’s another where he sprays lacquer on the shaped pieces and then sands it off to remove pits and pores in the wood. In what was once a bedroom, he curves the wood for the sides of the guitar. First, he takes a slender strip of beautiful rosewood and dips it into cold water. Once the moisture gives the wood elasticity, he clamps it to a guitar-shaped mold. Then he covers it with a yard-long red electrical heating belt. “This thing gets extremely hot,” he says. “The moisture steams out of the wood. It was designed by NASA to keep satellites from freezing in space.”
It’s one of the few high-tech items in Everett’s shop. Mostly, he uses the same tools that guitar makers have used for a century or more: chisels, planes, a band saw, sanding equipment.
There’s another room reserved for the finishing touches: decorative binding on the sides of the guitar and the sound-hole, and the often-intricate mother-of pearl and abalone sea shell inlays on the head-stock of the guitar and the fingerboard. One especially elaborate inlay pattern offered by Everett portrays a woman on the head stock. Her face is made of scavenged ivory from old piano keys, her hair and body are made from abalone and a shell from Hawaii called paua. She is blowing stardust from her fingertips, and there is a trail of little mother-of pearl stars falling down the guitar from a tuning peg all the way down the fingerboard.
It’s no coincidence that Everett is an impressionistic painter in his spare time. “I approach guitar-building as art: the aesthetic, the tone, the playability and also my artistic design sense,” he says. “I’m not a guitar factory, I’m an artist.”
Photograph courtesy of Kent Everett
Everett, 44, began playing the guitar when he was 11, favoring jazz music, and a few years later ran into someone who hand-built guitars. “I thought it was so amazing,” he says. “It was such a cool combination of woodworking and working with your hands, and I love working with my hands. Building guitars mixes that with my artistic input and my musical input. It was just the perfect thing for me.”
For years, it was little more than an after-hours hobby; Everett made his living repairing guitars at Atlanta Guitar Works, a shop he eventually owned. It was rewarding, but unfulfilling. In his spare time, Everett was crafting his first hand-built guitars, making about eight a year and selling them through word of mouth. By 1990 the market for high-quality guitars from independent builders began picking up across the country, and Everett decided to gamble that he could make a living at his hobby. “I was so sick of repairing guitars, but leaving it was scary because I was used to that steady flow of cash,” he says. “Even now, there’s something about that fear that keeps you pushing. I’ll go for months sometimes without any income. I can’t ship guitars when is freezing, so I’ll have a logjam. And then comes this wave of money. I really couldn’t have picked a more challenging way to make a living.”
At his peak production, Everett was building 50 guitars a year; he has since cut back to about 20 because the repetitive movement involved in the process was causing him problems with his shoulder and feet. He’s also launched a new mid-priced line of guitars called the Laurel Series, which he is building in conjunction with a Japanese company. The Laurels, which sell for under $2,000, are partially assembled in Japan to specs provided by Everett. The guitar is then sent to his shop in Atlanta, where he puts on the finishing touches.
His original plan was to sell the guitars through dealers; Everett was surprised to discover they didn’t want them. The market is awash with factory-built guitars from the famed companies — Martin, Gibson, Taylor — that sell in the same price range as the Laurels. So he decided to sell them through his Internet site, www.everettguitars.com. “I know it’s a killer guitar, I know it is,” he says. “There are problems with them coming from the factory; it’s not hassle-free. But the end product is good. It’s less than an Everett is, but you can tell it’s in the same family. I like to say you’re getting 80 percent of the guitar for 50 percent of the cost.”
But the franchise remains the Everett. One of his fondest memories is the night that he and a friend went by Eddie’s Attic to see a “songwriters in the round” show. As they walked up the stairs to enter the Decatur nightclub they heard an acoustic guitar, and Everett’s friend remarked, “Man, you sure can hear that Everett sound.” Sure enough, the performer was playing an Everett.
And, much to Everett’s surprise, so was everyone else on stage.
The final room is the house’s old living room, which has been transformed into a no-frills showroom. A few of his guitars hang on the wall, and others are sitting on guitar stands in a corner. There’s a long padded bench where people can sit and play. Everett grins as he brings down one of his guitars and hands it to a visitor. The sound is as beautiful as advertised, with a wonderful balance of tones. Up close, the craftsmanship is impossible to miss, the inlays and extra touches that Everett puts into his guitars to make them special.
“I’ve built over 400 guitars and I’m at the point where it’s like Zen: As you do it, you learn that you knew things that you didn’t even know you knew. “Everett says. “If you do the same thing over and over, you learn on a different level. I’ve done so many now that I know how they’re going to sound as I build them. I used to enjoy stringing them up and saying, ‘Wow, listen to this. But I haven’t built a guitar that didn’t sound good in 15 years.”
Photograph courtesy of Kent Everett
Everett takes back the guitar and begins playing jazz chords. For a moment his eyes drift off and he’s suddenly lost in another world. He plays for a couple of minutes, then stops and studies the guitar. “I’m having an instrument made for me now,” he says. “It’s such an interesting experience that I’d recommend all guitar builders do it. A buddy of mine from Decatur, Wade Lowe, is making it. He really encouraged me early on. He’s making me a little mandolin and I can’t tell you how much fun it is. I mean, you can’t go to a guy and have him make you a car, you know?”
Ironically enough, Kent Everett himself doesn’t have an Everett guitar. His personal guitar at home is an old Gibson. “Well, I actually own 40 of my guitars; they’re mine until I sell them,” he says with a laugh. “So I’m never hurting to play a guitar. But I haven’t kept one of mine because, frankly, I can’t afford one. If I keep one, that’s $3,000 I don’t earn. But I do plan to keep the 500th guitar that I build.”
The Gibson survived a fire and its owner brought it into Everett’s old repair shop. “I didn’t choose it, it kind of chose me,” he says. “They left it behind because it was too expensive to repair.” Rather than toss it in the trash, Everett began fiddling with the Gibson in his spare time. Over the years, he replaced this and adjusted that until the guitar was reborn.
He likes to sit at his house on Saturday mornings with that old guitar, drink coffee and play old blues and jazz songs. He’ll often ponder the guitar’s untold story: Who else owned the instrument? Who put the heavy pick-mark scratches on top? How did the lacquer shatter in that one spot? He will never know the history, but he’ll always know it’s there and he’ll always wonder. Just as he wonders what happens to the guitars he builds. “You know, if I was making spiral staircases, it wouldn’t mean what this does,” he says. “If you play a guitar, you’re kind of living through it.”
He relaxes a few moments, his arms folded across the top of the guitar that bears his name on the headstock. “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to kick you out now,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve got guitars to build.” He rises and, for a moment, holds the guitar at arm’s length, eyeing it tenderly.
Then Kent Everett gently places the guitar back on the showroom wall, ready for its odyssey to begin.
This article originally appeared in our February 2001 issue.
