Gene ZIERLER

Lyrics

MY D-18
(Album: Saints and Poets 2008)

It was almost 50 years ago that I was made to play
Born in 1959 in Nazareth, PA
And I felt the sweet vibrations from my head down to my heel
When the hands of a Massachusetts boy
Brought life to wood and steel

I played “This Land is Your Land” and “We Shall Overcome”
In a coffee house in Boston in 1961
We sang songs to protest the war in Vietnam
And finished that boy’s senior year
In the mud on Yasgur’s farm

I’m a loud and glossy X-braced box of spruce and mahogany
Named for the British battleship that sailed the cold North sea
Some ebony and tortoise shell and six Deluxe machines
I’m a vintage flat-top steel guitar, a Martin D-18

I cracked my side on a rocky stoop one night in Baltimore
And somehow got filled up with sand out on the Jersey shore
I crossed this land and played all night on a Northwest mountain side
And I got new frets and a neck reset
In 1989

Since then there has been silence; the boy has disappeared
I’ve been lying in this cardboard case in an attic all these years
I don’t plug in, I can’t rock out, my sound just isn’t cool
No one wants acoustic tones
Where the Stratocaster rules

But I can still remember all the words and melodies
I hear that Massachusetts boy playing “Freight Train” in C

I’m a loud and glossy X-braced box of spruce and mahogany
Named for the British battleship that sailed the cold North sea
Some ebony and tortoise shell and six Deluxe machines
I’m a vintage flat-top steel guitar, a Martin D-18
A vintage dreadnought steel guitar, a Martin D-18