Hitting the right notes, Bill Nichols and his cowboy guitars
By Katie Volz
Photography by Anthony Scarlati and Katie Volz
On a Monday afternoon, 76-year-old Bill Nichols and his son, Lynn, sit on the front porch of their Franklin home strumming guitars. Each holds an original electric six-string built by the elder Nichols. Slowly their inchoate strumming melds, and the two begin to harmonize.
Walking inside Nichols’ house gives hints of this man’s unique artistry and skilled craftsmanship. From coffee tables to decorative, mock safes to bedroom sets and most importantly, guitars, it seems that Bill Nichols can construct anything in his basement shop. Though all of Nichols’ creations are beautiful and reflect his talent for carpentry, his guitars stand out for their detailed work and reveal the careful planning that goes into the sound quality of the final product.
For Bill Nichols, music has not only been a life-long passion, but also a family oriented one. His wife, Peggy, proudly praises her granddaughter’s singing talent and describes the family’s traditional jam sessions.
“They get pretty wild,” Peggy says. “We have to send letters out to the neighbors beforehand to apologize in advance for the noise, and invite them to come join us.”
Getting started…
Bill Nichols was born Billy Graham in 1929 in Maine, where he was adopted and re-named Nichols. In 1949, he moved to New York and met his wife. Nichols opened an auto body shop outside of Rochester, N.Y., where he and Peggy raised their family. While there, Nichols pursued his love of music and guitars, which he cultivated as a teenager, playing in bands and working on guitars.
“They were pretty plain back then,” Nichols says of guitars in the 1950s, “painted white or ivory. The Fender music store got one in that looked like it was in a barroom brawl. I’d done some work for them before, so I brought it home and worked on it.”
While working on the guitar, Nichols gave it a new, more country style.
“I put a belt around it, which nobody had back then, and I fixed it all up and made it real western,” he explains. “When I took it back, the guy got so excited he put it in the window.”
Less than a week later, Nichols turned on the TV and saw a man playing his guitar in a country western band. That first guitar is still the inspiration for each guitar he makes.
Crafting an excellent instrument
Though he has been playing guitar and making music for more than 50 years, Nichols only recently started making his own guitars from scratch. Two years ago, he completed his first, not realizing that it would lead him to a new career in his 70s.
“I started making one for myself, and it turned out so well and played so good, I just kept making them,” Nichols chuckled. “I started making them and I couldn’t stop.”
One of the most unique aspects of Nichols’ guitars is the method he uses to build them. He layers the wood, rather than using one solid piece, and constructs his guitars using a combination of hard and soft wood to give the guitar a stronger internal resonance. This technique of layering hand-selected wood gives Nichols’ guitars the distinctive sound that sets them apart from other electric guitars. It also gives the guitars a “cowboy” look.
“That’s become the signature, the leather cowboy theme,” says Nichols’ grandson-in-law, Steve Hartley.
Lynn Nichols, son of Bill and Peggy, emphasizes the importance of the wood his father uses. “It’s really all about the kind of wood and the way it’s put together,” Lynn says. “It certainly makes the guitars look nice, but the sound qualities are quite impressive. It has a lot more resonance.”
This is obvious when Lynn picks one up and starts to play. The sound he produces is at once piercing and soft, vibrant and expressive. The guitar is plugged into an amp, which Nichols has made to match it.
Nichols designs the electronics of each guitar to fit the specific needs of the clients who commission the guitars. Each one, as a result, has its own character. Nichols likes to use specialized pickups made by boutique companies that provide higher quality products than many mass-producers. Nichols further individualizes the sound of each guitar by gearing the pickups to fit the type of music the guitar will produce. He then numbers each guitar he makes, solidifying its status as one-of-a-kind.
Finding his niche…
Nichols has enjoyed a very positive response to his work. While musicians in particular appreciate the sound quality, the guitars themselves are also designed with a specific aesthetic goal. Nichols says he seeks out knotty wood to enhance the rustic, country western look. To the same end, he wraps dark, carved leather belts around the edges of each guitar. Several have a Texas Longhorn stamp on the back, honoring the years the Nichols family spent in Texas, before moving to Tennessee nine years ago.
According to Hartley, the guitars have become a focal point of the community of musicians surrounding the family. “Musicians are around [the house] all the time, and they are just drawn to the guitars and want to pick them up,” he says. “At that point, the job’s made easy because they all fall in love with them.”
This was certainly true for Ben Rait, a blues musician from Detroit, who was the first to purchase a “Graham Guitar.”
“I have been playing my whole life in the Detroit bar circuit and I’ve played many different guitars, but I have never found another guitar with the same tonal qualities as Bill’s guitar. And of course,” Rait adds, “they’re all strikingly beautiful.”
“Graham Guitars,” the name Nichols has chosen for his project, pays homage his birth name.
“My real name is Billy Graham,” Nichols says, standing in his basement shop, holding a piece of wood that will soon be carved into a Graham Guitar. “So I went back to my roots.”
Contact the artist
For more information about Billy Nichols and Graham Guitars, please contact the artist directly at billydnichols@comcast.net.
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