A prominent guitar maker and blues musician from Pitt County has died. Freeman Vines had a workshop in the small town of Fountain, and he was known for building guitars using reclaimed wood.
Some of the wood came from trees used in eastern North Carolina lynchings. His work was featured in a book called “Hanging Tree Guitars” that received national attention, including from The New York Times and Rolling Stone.
Vines spoke with WUNC about his guitars last year for the Main Street NC podcast.
“Reclaimed wood always has a character,” he said. “It communicates with you, see, like this right here, that’s reclaimed wood, and it told me that it did not want to be the conventional type guitar.”
Vines died from cancer last week at the age of 82. Tim Duffy of the Music Maker Foundation, which worked closely with Vines, praised his legacy in a news release. The group chose to build its new eastern North Carolina recording studio next door to Vines’ Fountain workshop.
“Freeman Vines was a gifted conceptual artist whose deep spiritual philosophy had a profound impact on just about everyone he came in contact with,” Duffy said. “What inspired me most was the escalation in his artistic output after his cancer diagnosis of multiple myeloma two years ago. He was bound and determined to continue searching for the sound with his guitar-making and to see our studios through to their completion, and he did.”
In addition to his musical work, Vines had a unique biography. According to Music Maker, he was the oldest of 11 children and opted to work on a farm so his sisters could attend school. He went to prison at age 25 for his involvement in a moonshine operation, before later working at an auto body business and playing rhythm guitar in traveling bands.
