Fast forward to November 2007, when I received an e-mail from the producers of ‘History Detectives’: These are the photos that came with the e-mail from the ‘History Detectives’: The photos didn’t show a lot of detail nor did any of them show the entire guitar but they did confirm what Carlo had told me almost 15 years earlier about a guitar made more than 25 years before that. The only thing that I didn’t see in the photos were the inlays in the bridge, but since the guitar had been made such a long time ago, I assumed that Carlo could have been mistaken about those. I was quite excited about the fact that the producers had contacted me because here was a chance to learn a little more than what Carlo had told me and I wrote the following e-mail to the producer of History Detectives, hoping to get some more information about the guitar in question: Shortly after my e-mail I received the following message back: Meanwhile I had decided to investigate the matter a little further myself. I found some more footage of Josh White on the internet and these film clips did not only show the guitar rather well, but to my surprise they also showed the inlays in the bridge that Carlo had been talking about. And after looking a little more closely I discovered that the guitar in the clips not only had the inlays on the bridge, but it also had a different size pickguard than the guitar in the photos I had gotten. After finding several other small discrepancies it opened up the possibility that the guitar that Josh was playing in the clips, might not be the same guitar as the one pictured in the photos that were sent to me by the makers of ‘History Detectives’. Here's a still from one of the clips I found on the internet:
As you can see the bridge has small inlays on the wings. The pickguard in the 'still' photo is quite a bit smaller than the pickguard in the color photo. Notice how much closer the pickguard is to the bridge in the color photo and also how much closer the pickguard is to the edge of the body near the waist, but obviously one could argue that both the bridge and the pickguard could have been changed. So I got in contact with Carlo Greco again and asked him if he had made more than one of these guitars at the time. Carlo responded that he didn't remember but he agreed with me that the ‘stills’ I had sent him of the Josh White guitar in the clips showed a different looking guitar from the one in the photos sent to me by the producer of the program. After 6 months I was still waiting for the History Detectives to get back with me so I decided to write the program makers the following note: On May 13, 2008 I get the following e-mail from the History Detectives: At that point I couldn’t do much more than wait for the show to be aired on US Television and hopefully the makers of the program would get me in contact with the owner of the guitar after that, like they had promised. I did get a notification from the producers during January 2009 that the show would be aired the following month and since I expected they would have talked to many other people, I waited in anticipation for what they had discovered after they had gotten my initial letter. Since I’m located in the Netherlands I didn’t get to see the show at the same time as the US viewers but I did see it shortly after that on the internet. If you haven't seen it yet, here's the link: JoshWhiteGuitar First of all I would like to state that I truly enjoyed the fact that a Guild guitar was the subject of a TV show and also the fact that it was about Josh White who had been an important figure in the folk/blues movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s. At the same time I was really disappointed with the amount of research that the people who cooperated or appeared in the show had done themselves other than looking at the guitar and concluding that it was the one that Guild had made for Josh White. Mark Dronge’s explanation of how the Guild Josh White Model never came to be sounded somewhat ‘thin’ but it’s an acceptable story, especially in the light of Guild’s usual failure to attract the right players that could help change the ‘image’ of Guild guitars in general. However I didn't agree with the makers of the program that the guitar in question was positively ID’d as the guitar that was owned by Josh White. After looking at the photos of the guitar in question and looking at the available footage of Josh White playing the Guild guitar I could only conclude that there may have been another one of these guitars made and that the guitar investigated by the History Detectives might not be the guitar that was once owned by Josh White. Originally this story ended with my conclusion that I was not convinced that the guitar investigated by the History Detectives once belonged to Josh White. The makers of the program had gotten me in contact with the owner of the guitar, who promised to answer all the questions I had, but somehow that never happened. So it looked like that was 'end of story' for me. But that's not where the story ends!