The Poor Farmer Who Crafted Guitars to Serve God

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we return to our American Stories.

00:00:13
Speaker 2: Up next, a story you won’t forget from deep in the Ozarks about the time on or tradition of guitar making, and a man who made it his mission, not for monetary gain or any sort of fame.

00:00:25
Speaker 1: Let’s get into the story.

00:00:35
Speaker 3: You know, some people really resonate with Ed’s work, and some don’t get it. It’s interesting when I show this to other musicians, these instruments. Some musicians just embrace it and think it’s the neatest thing they’ve ever seen in their whole life, you know, and you can hardly get it out of their hands once they’ve got it. Other musicians play it and think, “Well, this is not a very good guitar.” “Why you’re so interested in this?” You know, they just don’t get it. They just that out don’t get it. So my name’s Kelly Mulholland, and this is my wife, Donna. Hi. And this Ed Stilly thing has been very much something we did together, and it kind of is parallel with our own relationship. I think we met twenty-six years ago and soon became a folk band called Still on the Hill after that.

00:01:28
Speaker 4: And actually, we are talking from our Ozark Instrument Museum.

00:01:33
Speaker 3: That’s right. Right now, we’re surrounded by instruments made by people from the Ozarks, but primarily one whole wall is nothing but instruments made by a man named Ed Stilly. She’s the one that discovered Ed Still.

00:01:51
Speaker 4: And so, what? Yeah, a friend of mine was giving me a massage, and I was over her house, and on her mantle there was an Ed Stilly guitar, and I was like, “What is that?” And she said, “Oh, I used to live in Hogscald Holler next to this man named Ed Stilly that made just hundreds of these strange instruments.” And I said, “Oh, my gosh, Kelly has got to meet him,” and so she took us.

00:02:13
Speaker 3: We got escorted to Ed’s place down in Hogscald Haller, which is just all by itself. It’s a very isolated community in the Ozarks, and it’s just like you walked back in time. It looks like it’s 1930. The shacks and all these, just basically what you might think of as a hillbilly existence. And they do have electricity now, but only recently have they added those sorts of things. They still were drinking water that was just coming down the hill in a creek into the hog called the Hogskullds. The Hogscald is a limestone formation right by the house where they would scald hogs in the little limestone pools. That’s kind of a whole nother story. But when we get there, there are dozens and dozens of instruments being underway, and they’re all just fantastic folk art, and we’re thinking, “This can’t be, you know, it’s just too good to be true.” And so we develop a relationship with that. He’s very, very welcoming to us right away, and we start visiting regularly, and we just go over there and see what he was doing.

00:03:20
Speaker 4: But ironically, Ed does not consider his instrument making art. It is just his mission to tell about God.

00:03:29
Speaker 3: This was a very devotional mission for him, and the reason for it all we found out very early when we asked him a very simple question: “Say, Ed, how did you get doing this in the first place?” And his answer was kind of unexpected. He said, “Well, I was plowing my field like I always do with my mule, and he must have had a heart attack, and there was nobody there to help him, and so he was laying on the ground and wondering what his fate would be.” And at this moment he had a vision that he was a tortoise, a giant tortoise, swimming in a raging river. These are his words. I’ll never forget. His five children were little tortoises hanging onto the shell, and he knew that he had to get the family to the other side of this raging river, and if he did, the Lord was going to tell him what his purpose was and what he was to do with the rest of his life. And so when he got to the other side of the river, what he heard was kind of unexpected. He was told to make musical instruments and give them to children.

00:04:44
Speaker 5: Bredow’s Ark’s sun speeding down rop my pile, the rocky grill, and the world turned black in a hard tack, and.

00:04:55
Speaker 6: A vision passed four nights. As I did, oh lie, I pray the Lord.

00:05:06
Speaker 5: Take me to the outs, I became a great torrents, swimming like kill. My father.

00:05:13
Speaker 7: And children clinging to my shell, and from a raging river, deep lie, bad day, I heard the Lord confid.

00:05:24
Speaker 3: Shared your vanity, shared.

00:05:28
Speaker 6: Your pride, and I’ll see him make it to the outside.

00:05:38
Speaker 5: And I knew that moment my fate was sealed, and.

00:05:41
Speaker 6: The Lord told me he’d make me a deal. I delivered my children to that shore.

00:05:49
Speaker 3: He’d showed me what these hands were for: real guitars in his name. That’s what I done day. So we love that story that he told us about the tortoise and the river, and we turned that into a song that we eventually called “Take Me to the Other Side,” and we played it for countless people over the years, and it’s just to become an anchor in our world. Back to having to make musical instruments.

00:06:18
Speaker 3: See, Ed had never made a musical instrument. Ed had made barns and chicken coops and gardens and gardens, you know, everything you need to do in the Ozarks to keep a family fed. But Ed had never made a musical instrument. He had an old guitar. He had a Sears and Robot no Silvertone guitar that he’d received way back in like 1940, and he used that to preach at everyone that does the truth.

00:07:02
Speaker 7: “Here us, my boys, I don’t let the truth going into heaven.”

00:07:06
Speaker 3: “No lifeltity. They have no life whatever.” So he was a remedial guitar player and an exceptionally good preacher singer.

00:07:17
Speaker 4: Knew every single hymn and all thirty verses of every single.

00:07:22
Speaker 8: Living encyclopedia of him, still oship by science, still sailing today, and a Gatherine Peel from “The Long and Last Way.” She’s I’m Diadam Aliens, and still landing more or the Saint I allg. He’s on some fire, sure the otrefasi man say.

00:07:51
Speaker 3: So, he’s told to make musical instruments and has no idea how to do it. He also has no resources to ask. He doesn’t know anybody he’s going to tell him how to do it, and he doesn’t have any books that show him how to do it. So he just figures it out, one instrument at a time. And that’s what I think is most interesting about Ed’s story is that he basically reinvented the wheel.

00:08:16
Speaker 2: And what a story you’re hearing! Ed has a heart attack, laying on the ground, and has this vision. And Americans have visions, and we talk about them, and we’re not embarrassed to. God told him to make musical instruments and give them to children. And then we hear this beautiful song about that experience. Ed, “Your vanity sed your pride, take me to the other side.” It never made a guitar, but God told him to, and he just figured it out, and in the end, reinvented the instrument.

00:08:48
Speaker 1: When we come back, more of Ed Stilly’s story here on Our American Stories.

00:09:41
Speaker 2: And we’re back with Our American Stories and with Kelly and Donna Mulholland. They’re telling the story of Ed Stilley, a poor farmer in the Ozarks. But they befriended, after learning about his unique guitars, guitars he made for a rather divine purpose. Let’s get back to the story.

00:10:03
Speaker 3: You know, there’s a great tradition in guitar making, and people learn from each other, but Ed just started from scratch, and so his first instruments were really strange and crude, and the fret placement had nothing to do with the proper fret placement, so they couldn’t really play music. They were just experiments. But he just kept trying, and eventually he learned how to put the threts in kind of the right place. And he’d used his old Silvertone as a model, so he eventually figured out how to make a playable instrument. We’re sitting here looking at this array of Ed silly instruments while we’re talking, and the shapes are all over the map. There’s one here that’s rectangular like a box, there’s this giant butterfly shape, and there’s one that’s oval. They’re all different shapes. There’s a real good reason for that. He was not trying to be clever or funny or whimsical in his shapes. They look like that; they look kind of cartoonish.

00:11:08
Speaker 3: But the fact is, we found out right away that the shape is really a result of this weird process—his unorthodox process that he used to build. He started with bending the sides. So he had this old piece of wood with pegs in it, and he would boil the wood that was going to be the side.

00:11:20
Speaker 4: In a hog trough overnight.

00:11:22
Speaker 3: Yep, they’re all a crazy quilt of Ozark wood. There was somebody there with the sawmill that was given him runoffs. They call it cutoffs or wood slab wood. It’s kind of the waste product from a sawmill. It’s the last piece cut.

00:11:35
Speaker 4: He’d say, “Their trash is my treasure.”

00:11:40
Speaker 3: And once he became supple, he said he’d just bend him until they were about to pop. And you know, he could start to hear him crack, and he’d just bend it randomly as far as the wood would allow, and then once it was dry in the morning, he’d take it off the pegboard, and it would kind of stay bent, and then whatever that shape was, that was going to be the guitar. So he would piece these little curd pieces together, and then he’d build a top to fit. Opposite of real guitar making, but before he put the top on, he would start this strange process of adding metallic components. And the metallic objects were basically to compensate. He didn’t have any power tools when he first started, so it was impossible for him to make the wood thin. A real modern guitar or what not. Me, any guitar is made very, very thin and lightweight, and that’s why it works. His were the opposite.

00:12:35
Speaker 4: It was frustrating because they didn’t ring and sing out, you know, the instruments were so heavy.

00:12:40
Speaker 3: Almost a quarter inch thick wood. So he started turning to metallic objects, something that you could flick with your finger and it would make a ringing sound.

00:12:49
Speaker 4: Pot lids and saw blades and springs and stuff.

00:12:53
Speaker 3: Glass jars, chainsaws, sprockets, tin cans, wind chimes. You know, I’m sure I’m forgetting some other objects. We’ve had all these, by the way. We took them all and had them X-ray. And it’s really fascinating to look at it and kind of figure out why he did what he did.

00:13:15
Speaker 4: And you said, “Ed, why do you put all this in?” He said, “To better speak the voice of the Lord.” That was his pat answer.

00:13:22
Speaker 3: You can hardly argue with that, but it was interesting.

00:13:29
Speaker 4: He never heard the word reverb. He did not know what reaverb was. And in creating reverb, like an amplifiers and stuff, they have plate reverb and spring weaverb, and Ed was creating reverb in his instruments just by osmosis, without not even knowing that that’s. What he was doing.

00:13:47
Speaker 3: He accidentally reinvented spring reverb and without knowing about either technology or the word.

00:13:57
Speaker 4: Yeah, for that. So if you give a strum on one of his instruments, you can just really hear the reaver ringing in it.

00:14:04
Speaker 3: It’s amazing.

00:14:15
Speaker 4: And he used, the reason they’re this red color is he used barn paint, barn-red barn paint because it’s.

00:14:23
Speaker 3: Very, very cheap.

00:14:24
Speaker 4: And then, then a really sweet thing is like every instrument in recent times has “True faith, true light, have faith in God” carved on the top. And for years Ed wanted to get a router so that he could just rout the letters and stuff. And he’s prayed and prayed and prayed, and finally his family just said they just broke down and they bought him a router, and he said, “My prayers have been answered.” And it’s so cute, but they all say that on them, “True faith, true light, have faith in God.”

00:14:55
Speaker 3: Really, that’s all it was interested in. He had one purpose in doing this, and that is for you to read those words. Yep, that was no small thing to add. He wanted people to see that, and this probably a good time to mention his connection to the Family Bible.

00:15:13
Speaker 4: It was really interesting because we had been out in his workshop, and there was a Bible sitting out there that had been, oh, it had been weathered. Some rain had fallen on it, and some mice had gotten to it and stuff. And I thought I wanted that as just kind of archival and maybe use it as an art project or something. I just thought that would be really cool, so I asked Eliza. I said, “Eliza, can we have this old Bible?” And she was embarrassed that had been weathered and not treated well, so she said, “No, not that one.” And so she took me into the extra bedroom, and there was a bureau, a dresser drawer with six drawers in it, and she opened the drawers up, and every drawer was filled with Bibles that he had read. He would wear out a Bible in a couple years, and there would be his writing all over the margins. He would write in every little underlying things, and he would totally wear it out within two years. And they were all in little plastic sacks and everything. And so she gave us one. That is just one of our treasures.

00:16:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, I’d love to show people this Bible because it’s astounding. It looks like being, it’s composting in real time. I mean, it’s just literally falling apart. But if you flip through the tender pages, there’s no section of it untouched, and then you realize that that’s a three year use. And then he just went onto the next one. You think that’s the Bible, but it’s not. It’s one of many Bibles, but the really profound part of that is that’s really key to understanding why it is such a time capsule, a living time capsule, because when he was a young man, he decided that his devotion was really his priority, and that he would for the rest of his life never read anything except the Bible. That’s all he needed. He didn’t feel deprived. So he never read a book, a magazine, a newspaper, never listened to the radio, never listened to the television. It was only the Bible. And for that reason, the fact that he was in an isolated little community without any technology, he didn’t basically notice that the twentieth century happened. He lived his life the way he lived when he was a young man for the rest of his life, and it’s just astounding. It’s almost as if you have found a pure time capsule where you can actually visit early America, you know, in a way that I can’t imagine finding. So it’s very valuable in that way. Oh, you know, our relationship, it’s been so wonderful over the years. You know, I know y’all can’t tell on the radio, but I have very long hair, and people might see me and think I’m a hippie. So you would think such a traditional person might be have a judgment about that, but there was never a judgment about that at all.

00:18:04
Speaker 4: From the very beginning, we showed up on the doorstep, and he just—they both welcomed us and with open arms.

00:18:10
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:18:11
Speaker 4: I think we were some of the few people outside of their immediate family and their immediate circle, kind of more of the worldly people that were part of their life. And that felt like a huge, huge honor. And when Ed was crossing over, he was in hospice, they wanted us to come and sing to him, and we spent days at the hospice.

00:18:33
Speaker 3: You know, one thing I think that really is important about what it did is, artistically, back to where we started, is the very idea that he didn’t even know this was art. He wasn’t craving recognition; that was not part of what he needed. Pet, it was one hundred percent devotional. That was the motivation, that’s the intent there. So, but artistically, you know, it is art, you know, whether he likes it or not, yeah, you know. And that’s what’s interesting to me is that very, very rarely can you find an artist that does not suffer from the burden of their own ego. You can’t just decide to be an Ed Stilly. You know, no matter how hard you try, you can’t be Ed Silly. When not and I make art, we’re constantly self-analyzing and second-guessing ourselves. “Is anybody gonna like this? Is this gonna be good for our concert? Is this good?” You know? We’re constantly doing that to ourselves, and that’s our ego, and we can’t seem to escape it. I don’t think anybody can, but Ed did.

00:19:39
Speaker 2: And we’ve been listening to Kelly and Donna Mulholland tell the story of their friend, Ed Stilly.

00:19:44
Speaker 1: You can go to StillontheHill.com if you addge instruments and some neat X-rays of them.

00:19:51
Speaker 2: And a special thanks to Katrina Hine for collecting this story in Monty, Montgomery for audio pre- and post-production. He did it with leftover wood from a local sawmill. There. “Trash is my treasure” on every guitar. “True faith, true light, have faith in God.” That Stilly’s story here on Our American Stories.