He played old-time country music in faded neon honky-tonks, the kind with Harleys and dented pickup trucks out front. Inside, whiskey-drinking balladeers belted out Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash.
I remember going to see him when I was little — maybe four or five. Everyone seemed to know him, and I was jealous I had to share him with these strangers in scuffed cowboy boots and faded jeans. They were loud, a little scary, and he was right at home — on that worn stage, playing lead guitar while the singer wailed, “I’m so lonesome I could cry.”
I sat in a cracked Naugahyde booth near the stage and had to lean back to look up at him — smiling down on me in his silver-dollar belt buckle and white Stetson hat.
He was twelve feet tall.
He played with some of country music’s greats in juke joints, Legion Halls, and Officers’ Clubs. But whenever they asked him to go on the road, he always said, “Can’t do it. I have four kids and a beautiful wife.” So he played three nights a week for “grocery money,” and toiled nine to five, plus overtime, at his blue-collar job, building jets and rockets in the Inland Empire’s thriving aerospace factories. He often worked seventy hours a week. Once, he told me he didn’t think he had been a good father because he “missed out on so much.”
I made a film about him a few years after he died. The title was the last sentence he ever spoke. We were all in the hospital, holding on to him. His eyes locked on my mother’s, and he whispered, in a voice almost too frail to hear, “Honey, don’t sell my guitars.”
In the film, I tell the story of my father, Kenneth Paul Montgomery, beginning when he was six, picking cotton from sunup to sundown on a poor Oklahoma farm. His first guitar was a gourd he made himself, and he practiced on it until the simple notes of Amazing Grace rang true. When he was seven, after the cotton was picked and the Bible study done, he repaired old bicycles so he could buy his first real guitar — a Silvertone from the Sears, Roebuck catalog.
Kenny walked down to the mailbox every day, waiting for his future to arrive.
He cherished that guitar, and as his collection grew over the years, the Silvertone always held the place of honor in his music room, next to his glowing jukebox and Fender Stratocasters.
In the movie, I have footage of him talking about that first guitar. We watch him take it down from the wall and cradle it. He says it’s his most important possession, and he keeps a close eye on it, “lest someone steal it.” Twice he suffered break-ins. In Oklahoma, a little boy crawled through the doggie door so his father and uncles could carry Kenny’s guitars into the night.
He rebuilt the collection — sometimes replacing like for like, sometimes splurging. But they never took the Silvertone.
As part of the film, I decided to restore his prized first guitar. I took it to Jensen’s, Santa Barbara’s beloved guitar shop, which closed last year after fifty-two years in business. I handed it to Chris Jensen and told him that my father had bought it from the Sears catalog when he was seven years old. I asked if he could restore it as a gift for my mother.
Chris took it, stared at the headstock, peered into the sound hole, turned it over, thumped it, then turned it back and stared for a good long moment. “What year did you say this was?
“1934. My dad’s first guitar.”
Chris laughed. “No way. This is a Japanese knockoff — a Checkmate — late ’60s, ’70s maybe.”
“What? Are you sure?”
Chris nodded and pointed to the name, plainly displayed on the headstock in shiny red letters—CHECKMATE. It had always been there. We had only ever seen the story he told us.
I drove to my mother’s house and told her the news. “Mom, I’m so confused. I never knew him to lie about anything. What happened to the real first guitar?”
She looked at me, waited a beat, and said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what happened to it.” Then she looked away, like she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it.
“Mom, where is it?”
She looked up. Her eyes held mine.
“You sold it.”
“Wait…. No.” I shook my head and struggled to make meaning from her words.
“I sold it?”
“You were little and you wanted to have a garage sale. So you scoured the house and found this old guitar in the closet that nobody played. You put it in the sale. I think you got five dollars for it.
He came to me later and said, ‘It’s gone. My first guitar is gone.’”
“Mom… I didn’t know. He never said anything.”
“He wouldn’t have. The next day, he went to the Goodwill, found another old guitar, and he put the story on that one.”
“I can’t forgive myself. I sold his most treasured possession.”
“No, you didn’t.” She held my gaze. “No, you didn’t. His most treasured possession was you.”
For a while, neither of us said anything.
Then I hung the old guitar back on the wall. We stood back and looked at it — at him — and let the tears fall.
Kenny’s music room has scaled down and moved a few times over the years. The guitars live in Tucson now with my mother and brother. With every move, they are unpacked and hung again. The “first guitar” still hangs next to the Stratocasters, where he always kept it. The silver-dollar belt buckle and the white Stetson hat quietly crown the neon juke box.
He’s still here.
And I’m leaning back to look up at him.
He’s still twelve feet tall.
Happy Father’s Day, I’ll always love you.
