Ex-Houston guitar maker’s clients included Van Halen, Lovett
Bill Collings liked to build things. And while he was blessed with good engineering genes, nobody would have guessed just what he would wind up building: a guitar.
His grandfather’s uncle was a pioneering automaker. His grandfather was the innovative president of Dow Corning, the manufacturer of silicone products. His father was an engineer. His parents hoped he would become a doctor, but he dropped out of a pre-med program at college.
“I liked the science part of that,” he once recalled, “but I like the science of manufacturing or making things more.”
He built hot rods, mostly as a hobby. But after working for five years in an Ohio machine shop and experimenting with improvised string instruments in his spare time, he found his true calling when he was about 30.
Abandoning metal for wood, he began a quest to perfect the kind of fretted musical instrument he had dabbled with since he was 13, in his case a C-1 model Gibson, like the one Elvis Presley played on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Self-taught and by then living in Houston, he learned on the job largely by fixing other people’s instruments before venturing to build acoustic guitars on his own in his apartment, making machine parts for them as well.
Collings, who died July 14 at 68 at his home in suburban Austin, became one of America’s preeminent luthiers, as string instrument makers are called. His company, Collings Guitars, said the cause of death was cancer.
Beginning in 1979, Collings’ company produced some 20,000 guitars for many of the world’s most accomplished rock, country, jazz and folk musicians, including Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Joni Mitchell, Eddie Van Halen, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Bill Frisell and Emmylou Harris.
His company later branched out into mandolins, electric guitars, concert and tenor ukuleles, and custom guitar cases, becoming a leader in massproduced musical instruments.
Business grew at first mostly by word-of-mouth. In the late 1980s, Collings produced two dozen custom guitars for George Gruhn, a vintage collector and retailer in Nashville, under the Gruhn logo. He began placing his own surname in distinctive script on the headstock of every instrument crafted in his shop.
He explained that making a single Collings guitar takes about 20 craftsmen more than 35 days working in a climate-controlled plant in Austin. The company turns out about six acoustics, three electrics, two mandolins and two ukuleles every day, or more than 3,000 a year. A new guitar ranges in price from about $3,300 to about $13,500.
William Ralph Collings was born Aug. 9, 1948, in Midland, Mich., to Wallace Collings and the former Angeline Commora, and was raised near Cleveland.
“I started playing when I was a teenager in Ohio, but I would usually just stare at the instrument, thump it, listen to it,” he said “I’d ask, ‘Why does that steel-stringed guitar sound different than the nylon-stringed one?’ Why did the sound of some guitars haunt me while others didn’t?”
He left the Ohio machine shop for Houston, where he worked for an oil field pipeline company during the day and indulged his passion at night.
He made his first guitar, a hybrid composite of a Gibson Dove, a Martin D-28 and a Guild D-25, from Brazilian rosewood on his kitchen table using a hand saw, hammer, chisel and plane.
In the late 1970s, Lyle Lovett was at a Houston nightclub when he became intrigued by the flattop guitar that Rick Gordon, a songwriter, was playing.
“It looked like nothing I’d ever seen,” Lovett said. “It was a Martin 000-shaped cutaway with wood binding, and I thought, ‘What kind of Martin is that?’ ”
After learning that it had been made by Collings, Lovett called him to repair the frets on his own Martin D-35.
“His guitars have personality,” Lovett said in a company video. “The sound is full of energy, just like Bill Collings is.”
After building about 50 more guitars, Collings was heading to California when he stopped in Austin. There he met the luthiers Tom Ellis and Mike Stevens and decided to move into their shop. He hired his first employee in 1989. The roster eventually grew to nearly 100.
Collings is survived by his wife, Ann, and daughter, Sara.