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Superstar
Freeman Vines honors a lost Black life with his ‘Hanging Tree Guitars.’
Vines did not work this wood to pursue a special sound so much as he delicately carved his way through history, in a part of North Carolina once known to be the heart of Ku Klux Klan territory. Though he could not confirm for sure that the wood was what it was claimed to be, Vines had a more important story on his mind: “What bothered me was: Where was he hung at? Who was he?”
Born in the area in the 1940s, Vines experienced a hard upbringing during the Jim Crow era, and still had to navigate race and class—carefully and sometimes fearfully—in more recent years. With the help of collaborator Duffy, whose artistic wet collodion photographs grace the book’s pages, and appear as if they are from another era, they discovered in 2018 the location of a tree that one woman claimed was the site of the last lynching in Fountain. There, in 1930, it was reported, 200 masked people participated in or watched the brutal murder of one man. Upon learning the identity of that man—29-year-old Oliver Moore’s death was reported widely in the press—Vines made guitars from the old black walnut planks, and haunted them with skull and snake motifs. “I reckon, in my imagination, it’s the man that died on that tree,” said Vines in the book. When asked if he believes there are spirits in the hanging tree wood, he continued, “You know they are. They’ve got to be. They’ve got nowhere else to go. The wood, actually everything, is involved spiritually. A little spirit rubs off on everything.”
Atlas Obscura has a selection from the book of Duffy’s photographs documenting Vines’s guitars and the landscapes that also inform his work.
Freeman Vines’s home, 2017.
Supersonic (1970), photographed in 2017 (left); Skelacaster (2017), photographed in 2018 (right).
Freeman Vines’s summer workshop, 2017.
Souls Died to Talk to You (2017), photographed in 2018. This was made using the “hanging tree” wood.
View from the hanging tree, 2018.
Field of guitars, 2017.
A North Carolina Artist’s Search for a Lost Sound Uncovered a Dark History
