INTRO: Getting to the Hart of the Matter

A few words on where this website & newsletter is headed | march10,2023

Bill on his back porch in the Spring sunshine ::: May 2022

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PREFACE: A Few Words About Mister Hart

By DOUGLAS JOHN IMBROGNO | march2023

I wish to tell you about my friend, Bill Hart. I like to say that he is among The Five Most Interesting People I Have Met in My Life. (And that list includes a 95-year-old, internationally beloved, Buddhist abbot-scholar-meditation master, so he is in some good company). Yet a snapshot recitation of his life’s resume will only hint at the complexities, the wild and weird depths of this multi-instrumental master luthier, electronics prodigy, polymath thinker, horse whisperer, and escapee from the Matrix.

Born in Naples; served in the Coast Guard; raised intermittently by a father who commanded a key Vietnam Era battleship; rejected his Dad’s posh, upwardly mobile military career and a whole lot else of society’s strictures; landed deep in the hilly West Virginia outback; mastered the art of shoeing horses while also mastering the art of hand-making world-class instruments, breathing into them the schema of a mind that speaks native electronica. I could go on …

For a couple of decades, now, I have been talking with Bill. I have strolled and ridden many miles into the hills of Appalachia with him (most recently with his beloved, country-road-rescue dog, Bark Raven). I have ridden on the backs of horses whose personalities he has whispered into full flower (I’m looking at you, Major). I have marveled as he planes, cuts, sands, and births from wires, wood, and a lifetime’s wisdom a cluster, a gang, a gaggle, a herd, an entire pack of world-class instruments. They number among them: guitars of all sizes, shapes, and artistry; basses and ukeleles in conventional form and ones transmogrophied into massive Flying V instruments, suitable for a swarthy Klingon to heft. Then, he’ll produce from his workshop a delicate, yet ferociously outspoken mandolin, inlaid carefully on its fretboard and hedstock with superbly fashioned abalone and mother-of-pearl, or gemstones culled into shapes inspired by drawings from letters from lovers.

You might also be wise to stand back a ways when he fires up the bank of floor-to-ceiling Marshall amplifiers in his backroom and proceeds to rock one of the Flying V’s or hepped-up guitars so loud that you wonder if someone up the holler thinks it must be a dynamite blast at a mountaintop removal site. On the other hand — well, with both his hands — Bill can also play not one, but two pennywhistles with his one mouth, soloing along with, say, Led Zeppelin blasting out those amplifiers.

There will be loudness. A bass guitar with a wall of amps at the ready in Bill’s backroom. ::: May 2022

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YET THIS WEBSITE and its companion newsletter will not be me waxing on about my dear, beloved Mister Hart. You will hear and see Bill directly — in a succession of photographs, podcasts, and video excerpts. This is a joint production, too, along with another of Bill’s brothers from another mother. Bob Webb is a master instrumentalist, engineer, and recording maestro, in his own right. He and Bill have been collaborating — on instruments, on strategies for living, on the ineffable made manifest in stringed things that bring music to life — for much of the middle of their lives.

So, as we are getting on in years, as Bill wrestles with his own maybe too-fast-approaching mortality, it is time to take stock of a delightful human being’s fabulous work in this world. This site will be an extended conversation between his friends and Bill’s whip-smart brain, sardonic humor, genius crraftmanship, and generous spirit, even if we have to troop into the heart of the heart of the country to meet up with Mister Hart.

Which is always, always worth it.