ON BOOKS

The ballad of Ed Stilley, guitar maker for the Lord

Marbles surround the soundhole of a guitar Stilley made for his niece Malinda Miller Fitch. Inside the guitar you can see the pipe and string arrangement that lends it a unique resonator sound.
Marbles surround the soundhole of a guitar Stilley made for his niece Malinda Miller Fitch. Inside the guitar you can see the pipe and string arrangement that lends it a unique resonator sound.

Pork chop bone whittled for a bridge,

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"True Faith, True Light" book cover is shown in this photo.

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University of Arkansas Press

From 1979 to 2004, self-taught luthier Ed Stilley worked in his Hogscald Hollow workshop. Stilley produced more than 200 stringed instruments, working by intuition without any formal instruction.

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University of Arkansas Press

Ed Stilley’s “Butterfly guitar” is an example of his late work. Stilley gave the guitar to Kelly Mulhollan, who plays it onstage when performing with his wife, Donna, as the folk duo Still on the Hill.

tail piece made from a rusty ole hinge.

Door springs, saw blades mounted in the middle,

Lord loves the sound when them ole parts jiggle,

sawed off frets from a braising rod,

carved on the top ... true faith true light have faith in God.

-- Kelly and Donna Mulhollan,

"Take Me to the Other Side"

PHILIP MARTIN

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

True Faith, True Light: The Devotional Art of Ed Stilley by Kelly Mulhollan, photographs by Kirk Lanier (University of Arkansas Press, $37.95)

There's this thing they call folk art, which is what happens when people who aren't trained as artists work in isolation, disconnected from fashion and the temptations of the marketplace. Without access to art schools, folk artists figure things out for themselves and intend their work to be useful and/or decorative rather than to comment on philosophical or societal images. Folk art is not concerned with aesthetics. It is not ironically intended.

Then there's this idea floating around that some of the best art is made by artists who don't know that they're artists. That's what Manny Farber, the painter and film critic, thought, and what he was getting at when he wrote his famous essay about what he called "termite art" (the sort of art that occurs incidentally, as a byproduct of some other enterprise) versus "white elephant art" (a thing made to be appreciated as "art"). Farber understood how a cheap horror movie, made by enthusiastic amateurs, could transcend its utilitarian roots and be received as a wonder.

These are concepts to keep in mind when considering the musical instruments produced by Ed Stilley, whose work is the subject of a beautiful book of photographs and essays from the University of Arkansas Press titled True Faith, True Light: The Devotional Art of Ed Stilley by musician Kelly Mulhollan, with photographs by Kirk Lanier. (The book also contains several black-and-white shots of the artist in his workshop that were taken by Flip Putthoff, who in 1997 was working for the Rogers Morning News, as well as X-ray images of some of Stilley's instruments taken by Dr. Dennis Warren of Fayetteville.)

Stilley, who was born on July 27, 1930, in Hogscald Hollow, a tiny community in Carroll County a few miles south of Eureka Springs, had been making his instruments for a few years before Mulhollan, who performs with wife Donna as folk duo Still on the Hill, met him in 1995. Stilley said that as a child, he was delivered into the care of a longtime Hollow resident named Fannie Prickett. After the nearly 90-year-old Prickett died, Stilley tried to honor her final request by becoming a preacher, but by the time he married in 1959 he was mainly a farmer, trying to dig a living out of the hardscrabble Ozark soil. He and wife Eliza reared five children on a homestead where Stilley built every structure by hand, by himself.

Stilley told Mulhollan that in 1979 he had what he believed was a heart attack while plowing. He lay down in the field and saw a vision of himself as a turtle, struggling to swim across a river with five smaller turtles -- his children -- clinging to his back. He said he heard the voice of God, who told him he would be restored to health if he would make musical instruments and give them to children.

The couple wrote a song, "Take Me to the Other Side," based on Stilley's version. But as Robert Cochran, the chair of the American Studies program at the University of Arkansas, points out in his introduction to the book, Stilley has on other occasions toned down his account of his theophany. When Putthoff visited him a couple of years later, he simply said he was, as Putthoff wrote, "called by God to build stringed instruments and give them to children." Similarly, in an interview with Missouri photographer Tim Hawley on the website edstilley.com, Stilley omits any mention of heart attacks or testudinal visions. (Putthoff is now Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's outdoors writer.)

"I laid down to sleep and the good Lord said to me, 'If you make these instruments and give them to little boys and girls,'" Stilley would get to heaven. (Hawley, who was involved with Mulhollan in mounting an exhibition of Stilley's instruments and X-ray images, has his own photo book on Stilley's work, Gifted: The Instruments of Ed Stilley, which can be ordered through edstilley.com.)

"In subsequent conversations and interviews," Cochran writes, "Stilley's narrative focused ... on petition-bearing preachers from outside the area with allegations of children inadequately cared for by a lunatic, religion-crazed father. Finally, in 2014, he provided ... a terse elliptical summary: 'I was pushed where I didn't want to go,' he said. 'No way out.' He described himself as waiting at home for a resolution he regarded as both terrible and inevitable when, as he waked and dozed, the saving instructions arrived. Stilley would craft musical instruments and give them to children; God would provide."

Stilley has been inconsistent with the details of his inspiration, but the central point remains the same. Times were uncertain and his family was in jeopardy, so he gave himself over to do God's will.

It is not easy to make a guitar. Usually aspiring luthiers -- that's what they call people who hand-craft stringed instruments -- apprentice themselves to established masters and learn the trade over the course of years. But Stilley had no one to teach him, and limited resources. He didn't have a television when he started building guitars in 1979, and the Internet wasn't a dream.

In the book, Mulhollan quotes Stilley:

"Someone in town told me, you can't make guitars out of thick sawmill wood, but I remembered that the Lord never taught me the word 'can't' so I went right ahead and just started makin' 'em."

Mulhollan often visited Stilley after their initial meeting and observed his unorthodox process. In the book he details how Stilley constructed his instruments, allowing the wood to dictate the final shape. He boiled side pieces overnight, then threaded them around a homemade pegboard, bending them until they began to break. Once they dried, he assembled these random shapes into a frame.

As might be expected, his first efforts were hardly playable. Stilley initially had no knowledge of how scale length (a string's distance from nut to bridge, with the 12th fret precisely halfway) affected tone, so his frets sometimes were bizarrely spaced -- but he kept experimenting and, through trial and error, eventually began producing workable instruments with strange and unique qualities.

On every one he carved the legend "True Faith, True Light, Have Faith in God." In all of them he installed a kind of metallic skeleton made of stretched springs, saw blades, pot lids and other odds and ends that create reverb effects, lending the instruments unique voices, allowing them to, in Stilley's words, "better speak the voice of the Lord."

There's a real method to Stilley's use of these internal elements -- most of the wood he used to construct his instruments was too thick to vibrate in the same way as a traditional guitar top. So it's the metal inside rather than the wood that's most responsible for each instrument's tone. (You can hear music performed on some of Stilley's instruments at stillonthehill.com/listen-stilley.)

From 1979 to 2004, Stilley produced and distributed more than 200 instruments -- guitars, fiddles, mandolins and banjos -- and some of his pieces are rough and awkward, some possessed of a remarkable weird beauty. True Faith, True Light documents more than 40 of these instruments, with front and back images and closeup details by Lanier, supplemented by X-ray images revealing their ingenious interiors.

While Cochran in his introduction makes a compelling case for Stilley as one of the great American outsider artists, Stilley never sought any recompense or recognition, preferring, as he tells Hawley in that video interview, that he always "left his name out of it."

"He asked for no pay, but his creations brought peace in their making and confer blessing in their giving," Cochran writes. "They are Ed Stilley's crowns; they are a goodness."

And now they're works of art.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

Style on 01/24/2016

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