Lauren Sheehan will play songs from "The Light Still Burns" as well as salute the women in folk who shaped her music at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Central Library. It's free. She'll be at Artichoke Music on April 13.
First there was a photo.
Taken in 1944, it features 75 women in front of Gibson's guitar factory in Kalamazoo, Mich.
Next, John Thomas, a guitar player, collector and law professor at Quinnipiac University, came across a copy of a 1973 history of Gibson written by Julius Bellson, who had been the company's personnel director during World War II. In it, he wrote that production had been stopped for the war.
But what about that photo?
In another book on the company, Thomas found mention of greatly scaled back production, a few guitars made by a handful of skilled craftsmen who stayed home from the war.
But what about that photo?
Thomas would get to the bottom of that question, write a book and, in the process, bring along Portland singer and guitarist
to provide musical accompaniment.
The book is "
" The companion record, "The Light Still Burns," takes its title from a 1943 magazine ad for Gibson.
Sheehan will celebrate its release at 2 p.m. on Sunday with a free show at the Central Library, performing with one of the "Banner" guitars made at that Gibson factory during the war. The name comes from the gold banner on the headstock that reads "Only a Gibson is Good Enough." It went on the guitars in 1942, Thomas says, and came off in 1945. "It's a marker."
And it marks a lot of guitars. Thomas says he eventually talked his way into Gibson's corporate headquarters in Nashville, where he discovered shipping ledgers showing 25,000 guitars shipped during World War II. Production hadn't stopped; it had, like so many other jobs, been handed over to a nearly all-female work force.
He set about tracking down the women in that 1944 photo, placing ads in
The 1944 photo of the Gibson workforce that started John Thomas down the path to "Kalamazoo Gals."
newspapers in and around Kalamazoo. He found a dozen.
"I interviewed them and wrote this book around them," Thomas says.
Taking advantage of Quinnipiac's diagnostic imaging department, he also set about a detailed examination of Gibson guitars built pre-war, post-war, and during the war.
Robert Corwin, a collector, musician, and photographer (he took a lot of historic Newport Folk Festival shots), was picking and dropping off guitars for imaging when Thomas happened to meet Sheehan.
Sheehan and Corwin had just done an appearance where Sheehan had been playing some of the instruments in Corwin's collection -- including one guitar made in 1847. Over tea, Thomas told Sheehan about the women in the factory, and his idea that there should be music with the book. He asked her to record it.
"He hadn't heard me play," she says, "and I hadn't met him."
She suggested they take a week so he could listen, and she could read the manuscript. A week later, she was even more into the idea. The Kalamazoo gals get a lot of the credit.
"They reminded me of my grandmother," Sheehan says.
In honor of the 12 women Thomas tracked down, they cut a dozen songs with what turned out to be 15 guitars made in Kalamazoo during that period. Sheehan's 23-year-old daughter, Zoë Carpenter, sang background vocals on two tracks, continuing on down the generations of women.
They worked for 10 days in New Haven, Conn., the final day being cut short when the studio owner killed the power in advance of hurricane Sandy.
Most of the songs are as old or older than the guitars. There is one song, "Hard Times," off Gillian Welch's 2011 record "The Harrow & the Harvest," but she sounds like the period Sheehan was working with.
"With absolute minimal effects, minimal changes from track to track, you can really hear the difference in the guitars," Sheehan says. "We're trying to feature the sounds of the guitars."
And the guitars sound great. That's no surprise, because what Thomas concluded after all that imaging is that the guitars the women of Kalamazoo made were just a pinch more finely constructed than the pre- and post-war models.
, by the way, it still says production was halted for the war.