Washington County Enterprise-Leader
A MAN ON A MUSICAL MISSION
ARKANSAS FOLK ARTIST, INSTRUMENT CRAFTSMAN CELEBRATED IN NEW BOOK
Ed Stilley, a definitive frontiersman farmer from Hogscald Hollow, Ark., is on a mission from God.
Stilley, a devout Christian who only reads the Bible, lived off of the crops he grows on his land and lives with his wife Eliza and his five children in a home he built himself and lived without the modern conveniences of the 20th century, excluding electricity of course.
In 1979, when he was about 50 years old, Stilley felt something like a heart attack while plowing his farm. He laid down. Staring up at the sky, a vision came to him. He saw himself as a large tortoise struggling to swim across a river, and on his back were five small tortoises. That’s when he said God came to him in a vision — telling him that he would be restored to health if he would agree to do one thing: make musical instruments and give them to children.
Stilley didn’t have prior training, didn’t know anything about being a string instrument craftsman, but it didn’t matter.
In his workshop, he chopped, boiled, bolted and nailed wood to bend into whatever he could get to work to resemble a playable string instrument. Many instruments he built were jagged, rough and asymmetrical. Their insides contained things like Gillette shaving cream cans, saw blades, pot lids, door springs, tubes and bones — whatever he could find to create a tone, or rather “to better speak the voice of the Lord.” Once he got his hands on a router, every instrument he made after had his free-handed inscription “True Faith, True Light, Have Faith In God.”
“The most important thing to Ed Stilley is for people to read those words,” said Kelly Mulhollan, one half of folk duo Still on the Hill. “He sees that as the crux of what he’s learned from the Bible.”
Throughout the course of 20 years, Stilley went on to make 200 one-of-a-kind instruments and gave them away to children in the area. Gout crippled his hands in the mid-2000s, inhibiting him from making more.
Mulhollan recently published a book about the life and work of Ed Stilley. The book, “True Faith, True Light: the Devotional Art of Ed Stilley,” printed by the University of Arkansas Press, features hundreds of photographs by Kirk Lanier and an introduction by Robert Cochran, the chairman of the Center for Arkansas Regional Studies and a UA professor. The book is also the first in the Imprint series from the David Pryor Center’s Center for Arkansas Regional Studies.
“I’ve been here 40 years,” Cochran said. “I’ve never seen anything remotely like Ed Stilley.”
The book features Stilley’s story parallel to a chronological photo collection of Stilley’s craft from his earliest instruments he made to some of the last, more-sophisticated ones Mulhollan was able to find and have photographed. Some instruments were X-rayed to show their bizarre inner workings.
Mulhollan spent 10 years tracking down the instruments and those who Stilley gave his instruments to. Some were sold to flea markets, and one was found in a large trash bin.
“Some people just put them in their barns because they’re challenging to play,” said Donna Mulhollan, Kelly’s wife. “Now because of our book and our interest for years, people that own them are starting to realize they have something special, that the crudeness is part of the story. They are folk art.”
The Mulhollans discovered Stilley in 1995 when Donna saw one of Stilley’s guitars at a friend’s house and invited him to see it. A passionate wood worker and fan of folk art, Mulhollan knew he had to meet the man behind the impossibly unique guitar.
Upon meeting, the Mulhollans and Stilley formed a friendship that remains strong today. From the start, Stilley treated them like extended family and allowed Kelly to borrow his guitars for weeks at a time. Eventually Stilley gave Donna a fiddle and Kelly his large “butterfly” guitar. The instruments have been a part of every Still on The Hill performance since — used in their Ed Stilley tribute song, “The Other Side.”
“He was welcoming from the start,” Kelly said.”You’d think that me being a long-haired guy, you’d think that might put off somebody of that traditional nature. Not at all. He embraced us from the start.”
Stilley’s first public exposure to the world came in 1997, when Kelly had Flip Putthoff, a photojournalist for the Rogers Morning News (now part of the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette), do a story on Ed. Putthoff was able to immortalize Stilley in his prime. That very article can be found framed on the wall of the Stilley home today.
In 2013, after the book had been completed but unpublished, the Mulhollans worked to curate a exhibition of Stilley’s life work in a gallery at the Walton Arts Center for the Fayetteville Roots Fest. His guitars had been arranged and displayed in chronological order along the wall for all to see. Even Stilley, now confined to a wheelchair, was able to be present. He spent the majority of his time singing hymns and passing out cassette recordings of his preachings.
“I walked in cold into Ed Stilley’s exhibit at the Walton Arts Center,” Cochran said. “I didn’t know Kelly. I saw them not as musical instruments, but as mini statues. I found them as works of art displayed on a gallery wall. Even though it was a first impression, I found them endurable, as pieces of artwork.”