BILL COLLINGS
1948 – 2017
William Ralph ‘Bill’ Collings, founder of Collings Guitars of Austin, Texas, died on 14 July 2017, aged 68, after a short but severe battle with cancer. He was much loved and highly respected both within the guitar industry and by a loyal group of customers worldwide
Bill Collings’ story began in August 1948 in Midland, Michigan, born into a family of engineers. His parents encouraged him towards medicine, but after a stint as a pre-med student in Cleveland, Ohio, he took a job at a machine shop, fascinated by the process of manufacturing. He moved to Houston, Texas in the mid-70s where his interest in “figuring out how to make stuff” became increasingly focused on acoustic instrument building, albeit in his spare time. Arriving in Austin in ’79, his building and repair work began to attract the attention of local musicians, notably Lyle Lovett who remains a Collings Guitars endorsee, friend and ambassador to this day.
By the late 1980s, Collings had hired his first employees following a more concerted effort to “take guitar building seriously” and, in his words,“quit partying”. His intention was to build a business as his wife, Ann, was expecting their daughter, Sara. The word spread and the reputation grew as Collings Guitars began turning up in the hands of players including Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell and Keith Richards. Fast forward to 2017, the artist roster is extensive and there are currently close to 100 staff at a purposebuilt manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas, meticulously balancing precision engineering and hand-crafting across some 3,000 acoustic and electric instruments per year. In 2014 a sister brand was added, Waterloo Guitars, focusing on Depression-era flat-tops.
His interests weren’t solely in guitars. He was a keen sailor. In fact, he met his first employee – master luthier Bruce VanWart – over a conversation to build a boat. He was also never far from car or a motorcycle, or at least part of one. There were various engine components and panels bustling for space in Collings’ ostensibly chaotic ‘office’, while body shells, chassis and works-in-progress filled an adjacent building. In the same way he acquired a machine to beat his own car body panels, he insisted on installing machinery to make and press the company’s own laminate timbers for certain thinline electric guitars, starting with the I-35LC in 2011.
Collings’ no-compromise doggedness with new developments often resulted in extended trial and error: what most big companies call R&D, yet what most guitar companies would laugh out of the boardroom at inception given its open-ended ‘it-will-be-done-when-it’sdone’ nature. In his view, perfection didn’t exist, but “you can get real close”. It might have been a manifold or simple piece of trim for one of his hot-rods, or a two-year project of reimagining the humble guitar case. He was both fortunate and canny in having a highly dedicated, skilled and loyal team to help bring the ideas to fruition. By any measure, that team remains the bridge between one-off artisan and perhaps the most peer-respected acoustic guitar manufacturer of all. Yet despite the achievements and consistent development, Bill Collings was uneasy with personal accolades or recognition, no matter how frequently they poured in.
When meeting him for the first time, there was a sense of reverence, though closer friends and colleagues would point more readily to the irrepressible and irreverent practical joker – eye-rolling schoolboy antics, perhaps as the levity against the innate focus.
In conversation, it would take a minute to engage, whereupon his directness and humour were both arresting and disarming. He’d freely give you everything he knew in a way only he could phrase it, punctuated with loud laugh. He gave just as freely to other luthiers and guitar companies should they ask for insight or advice. And ask they did.
We asked Doug and Tina Chandler, close friends of Collings and European distributors, for their thoughts: “Tina and I loved Bill from the moment we first met him. He was a loyal friend and a totally trusted business partner. His directness often took people by surprise; he did not suffer fools and frauds gladly, but if he liked you he never left you in any doubt how he felt about you. After the Brexit vote and following the new CITES ruling, Bill was the first one to check in on my mobile, concerned about the impact on us and our business.
“There’s no denying Bill was a tough guy to work with – his own standards were beyond those of most of his peers, and you had to up your game just to stay in the same room, but humour was never far away. Bill’s was the kind of intrusive slapstick that often forced you to laugh at your own shortcomings, and be the better for it. We will miss him dearly, and we won’t see his like again.”
Bill Collings leaves a peerless legacy in guitar making. Unequivocally, he and his team have raised the bar for quality and consistency in high-end acoustic and electric instrument manufacturing. He was no genius mad scientist, rather his was an instinctive synergy of art and engineering; the yin and yang so often separated in modern guitar building. They were one and the same to him.
As Lyle Lovett eloquently says: “His energy, his drive – you feel that and you hear that in every guitar that comes out of the shop. The sound is full of energy, just like Bill Collings.”
Collings is survived by wife, Ann, daughter, Sara, and two sisters, Martha and Laura.