Had an amazing evening and morning with David McCarthy in the Bay Area. We photographed a bunch of his Mosrite guitars for the book, but he also pulled out some other amazing stuff—I mean, truly mind-blowing stuff.
David is a well-known coin dealer and has turned up some very impressive things over the years. Most recently, he purchased and authenticated a coin that is the very first United States coin ever minted. Not from the first year, not from the first batch—the very first coin.
He was also in the news a few years ago over his authentication of the second known photo of Billy the Kid. It’s another fascinating tale that would take a book to detail the amount of research involved. If you’re interested in more history, here’s an article about the photo.
He just recently acquired all of Paul Bigsby’s templates, which sold at an auction a few months ago. I had seen these templates years ago at Dave Westerbeke’s house, but I forgot that many of them are made on the back side of cut-up country music show posters from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Amazing. It was great to see the pickguard templates for the Jodie Pilliod and Dale Granstrom Bigsby guitars that I now own, as well as templates for Joe Maphis, Lefty Frizzell, Grady Martin, and so many others.
He’s got a 1954 Cimarron Red Fender Stratocaster that he’s 99.9% sure is Bill Carson’s famous Cimarron Red Stratocaster. Carson was a famous Fender employee who also played guitar for country music bands. He spent time with Hank Thompson, Billy Gray, Spade Cooley, and others. Carson was instrumental (no pun intended) for many of the features found on the most iconic electric guitar of all time (the Fender Stratocaster), so his personal guitar is—well—astounding. It was painted around the same time as Eldon Shamblin’s famous Gold 1954 Stratocaster, before Fender really offered custom colors, and the process of authentication is almost as fascinating as the guitar itself.
There’s a Martin that belonged to Jerry Garcia that was used to write all the songs for Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. Not my area of expertise, but it was a beautiful 1930s Martin with an incredible history. There were blackguard Teles and Les Pauls and Rickenbackers and Marshalls and Martins and Gibson and enough guitar geek stuff to keep us up until two in the morning.
This morning over breakfast, he showed me a couple other historical things of interest he had within arm’s reach. One was a two-thousand-year old silver stamped “curse tablet” from Turkey (an inscription usually buried to enact a curse or wish or prediction, a common practice in that era). The other was a powder horn that was engraved by a silversmith in April 1776 that is the very first depiction of the Stars and Stripes, the earliest and crudest artistic rendering of what would eventually become the US flag—done right after the siege of Boston and four months before the Declaration of Independence.
We also discussed the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and the Voynich manuscript. Our breakfast table meanderings could have gone on all day, but it was time for me to hit the road to Bakersfield. There’s more work to do.
See more photos at Deke’s original Facebook post!
