Grit Laskin 'Origins of Bluegrass' guitar for TAMCO.

Trevor TAMCO, I for one am most definitely interested in seeing Grit's remarkable artistry unfold, please.


Brian

Thanks.

My Current build by Grit Laskin for TAMCO is under way. I asked for a Bluegrass theme.

From Grit "After much thought I chose to focus entirely on Bill Monroe, and the very beginning moments of Bluegrass. I’m calling this design “Origins”. Here is what you’re going to see…

Starting at the headstock and moving up the neck:

-A portrait of an older Bill, playing his mandolin (a mandolin HAD to appear, not just because of Monroe’s legend, but because I’m making this for YOU!).

-still in the headstock we begin the history lesson - we see the label from the first single-song record that Monroe made, in 1940, “Mule Skinner Blues”, recording with his ‘blue grass boys”.

This should be a real work of art - those depictions looks great so far/

I'll move this thread to the 'builds' section if that's ok

It's a long explanation...

"The story is pretty boring. When I was 9 years old, and going to summer camp for the first time, people called me the nickname of the day: ‘billy goat’. FYI people called me Bill, not William or Will, either of which would have worked better with my last name. With Bill there are too many ‘L’s” in a row, so it sounds like Billlaskin. In primary school I always had to pause, to separate the names, during attendance.

Anyway, going to the same camp, three successive summers in a row, my pals played with my nickname—just fooling with language as kids do—and it morphed, over those three years, from Billy Goat to Billy Groat, to Groat, to Grit. Where it settled gave me a name that worked better with Laskin, so I clamped on to it.

When I came to Toronto as a 17 year old I introduced myself as Grit and began my ongoing double-name life. Early on some people knew me as William, others as Grit, and I developed the habit of putting both names in my signature, ie. William ‘Grit’ Laskin so there would be no confusion. When I used to perform more people would come up to me--Grit—after the gig and ask if I had a brother--William-- who made guitars? And the opposite would sometimes occur: “Is your brother a songwriter?”.

He thought 'willyskin' better than 'billaskin'? Should've just called himself 'fore'

Summer? In the North West? You mad fool...

-in the higher frets we see the title to the first LP Monroe recorded, in the actual font, and given the text we can feel how the genre was beginning to take its name. Behind the lettering will be the blue sky as it looks on the album jacket

-in the background to this title we see the stylized portrait of Bill, which actually comes from the right hand side of the same Opry poster we saw earlier. What this accomplished for me however is making Monroe himself the bookends to the narrative.