Starting Small, But in a Big Way
Songwriter Lyle Lovett, one of Collings’ stron-gest supporters, recalls their first meeting in
1978. Lovett was at a Houston club listening
to a songwriter by the name of Rick Gordon,
and he was intrigued by Gordon’s flattop. “He
was playing a guitar that looked unusual to me,
it looked like nothing I’d ever seen. It was a
Martin 000-shaped cutaway with wood binding,
and I thought, What kind of Martin is that?”
The plain headstock didn’t help, so Lovett made
it a point to ask Gordon about it during his
break. That was when he first heard the name Bill
Collings. Having a Martin D- 35 in need of a fret
job, Lovett contacted Collings to do the work.
“Bill said, ‘Sure, come on over,’ just like that.”
Lovett continues, “He was living and working in
Houston at the time. He lived in a two-bedroom
apartment—one bedroom was where he lived
and the other was his workshop. I remember
getting to his apartment at about two in the
afternoon, and I didn’t leave until about nine
that night. He fixed dinner for me, showed me
every piece of wood he had in his shop, showed
me guitars he was building and working on. And
before I left that day, I ordered my first Collings
guitar.” It was a dreadnught with a German
spruce top and Indian rosewood back and sides,
and it was his main stage guitar for years. Lovett
also played it on all of his early recordings. “It
turned out to be #39, the thirty-ninth guitar
Collings ever made, and I still have it.”
Another early fan was Jerry Jeff Walker, a songwriter and road warrior who encountered his
first Collings guitar in the early ’80s in a Houston
guitar shop. “Bill came in and he had this little
0-style guitar that he made to show his mother
what his work was like, and it was the most
amazing guitar I had ever played. I couldn’t
believe the sound that was coming out of it. It
was just a little bigger than a baritone ukulele,
and it sounded like a D- 28.” Walker recently
gave his son his first Collings guitar because, as
he laughingly tells it, “I’m 68 years old—I don’t
need to be collecting guitars!” He kept the two
new ones made for him in 2008, though.
The All-Important Boat That Didn’t Float
In the early ’80s, Collings decided to move to
California but only made it as far as Austin,
and that’s where he’s been ever since. He
shared shops with luthiers Tom Ellis and Mike
Stevens for a few years before moving to a
small, one-stall garage shop on his own. In
1989, he hired his first employee, Bruce Van
Wart, who is still with Collings. Among other
responsibilities, Van Wart chooses all the
wood for the flattop guitars and the ukuleles.
The funny part is that Van Wart initially connected with Collings over a boat. “We had a
mutual friend, and he said, ‘You need to meet
this guitar builder, because he wants to know
about building this boat’—because I used to do
that. So, I went over to the shop, he showed me
his boat plans, and we talked. He never built
the boat, but we had fun.” Van Wart didn’t see
Collings again until one of his guitars needed
some work. “I worked for a weekend or two in
trade for him doing a neck reset on my Martin,
making some stairs going up into the loft in the
shop, helping him build a spray booth. I was
doing house remodels at the time, and that was
pretty slow down here. He said, ‘Hey, do you
wanna work for me?’ and I said, ‘Okay!’”
Collings and Van Wart worked together for
several months, “Then, all of a sudden, there
were five people. So it got pretty exciting.”
Van Wart explains, “Everybody had their
routine and we had to kind of dance around
each other because it was a real small shop.
The first shop I worked with Bill in, the spray
booth was in the building next door, so when
it was raining you had to run with the guitars
