Hi, As it says above, my name is Wayne L. Wright and I played guitar for a living... I had a lot of fun doing that and I really loved playing my guitar, a beautiful blonde, left-handed cutaway Excel model D'Angelico, made about 1952 or 53, according to what I could find in the D'Angelico black log books at the American Guitar Museum in New Hyde Park on Long Island, NY.

It wasn't made for me, but I was lucky enough to find it in New York City around 1959 when I was preparing to move to NYC from Detroit with my wife and family.

I think it was made for a friend of John D'Angelico's who was a lefty and was always having to sell it or something because he was always out of money. Being a friend of John meant that he would go out and buy John a bottle of Scotch and sweet-talk him until he would relent and build another guitar for the guy.

You could say the guy must have been some kind of a jerk, but if it hadn't been for whoever this guy was or did or didn't do, I'd probably have never found the damn thing. So there!

Needless to say, I'm very grateful. I'm not sure of his name but I'm told that he was something of a gypsy kind of guy, very free-spirited and easy going. Just the kind of guy John always wanted to be, so it was a fortunate relationship, at least for me.

My first experience with a D'Angelico was seeing the great Johnny Smith with his special New Yorker model that John D' had made for him. I was still living in Detroit at the time and it was just before I was drafted into the US Army that I saw and heard Johnny play. 

I couldn't believe what I saw and heard him doing. His fingers were like telescopes and snakes running all up and down the fingerboard with the least amount of effort imaginable. And EVERYTHING came out so clean as if he had put a ruler next to the following note and then just played it. But at such a great speed.

I've since had to retire from active playing because I have advanced emphysema, which is a very debilitating disease of the lungs and was caused by heavy smoking over a period of 40 plus years. I haven't smoked in well over 20 years. It's too late now because the damage has been done, and there is no cure for it.

I'm not discouraged by it because at my age, (75 and counting) one begins to think differently about such things. I think I did accomplish a lot during my many years of performing, and I'm sure that if I could still be playing, I would, but I can't and that's that.

I want to include other stuff here but haven't yet figured out how.

 

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