Strings Attached
Sarah James and the Stories Old Guitars Tell
Writer Joseph J. Airdo // Photography Courtesy of Sarah James
Sarah James had come to the old convent in Pittsburgh for silence — a private meditation retreat, nothing spiritual about it, just a quiet place to think. What she found instead, leaning against a wall in one of the rooms, was a guitar. She asked one of the nuns if she could buy it.
“Honey, you don’t have to buy it,” the sister said. “Just take it. We’ll give it to you.”
James took the guitar to a luthier. His jaw dropped: “You don’t know what you have here.”
What she had was a 1938 Martin 000-28 — what James calls a triple-ought 28, considered the Holy Grail of Martin guitars. She had pulled it from a convent wall thinking nothing of it, and walked out holding one of the most coveted acoustic instruments in the world.
“That’s the guitar that really started everything for me,” says James, now a Scottsdale-based singer-songwriter, recording artist, and founder of Vintage Guitar Legacies, a video series dedicated to the history and stories of exceptional instruments. “For me, these instruments are connected to people. The sister who owned it was in her 90s, retiring from the order. She said, ‘Oh, the kids play with that all the time.’ And here I am finding out how significant it is.”
That moment of accidental discovery crystallized something James had been circling her whole life — a conviction, inherited from a mother who collected early American antiques and a father who ran the oldest wooden boat-building company on the Great Lakes, that the objects people make and play and pass along carry something irreplaceable inside them. At 76, she has built an artistic life organized around that conviction, performing across the North Valley while simultaneously running a video series that has drawn subscribers from around the world.
The two pursuits are more entangled than they might appear.
James launched Vintage Guitar Legacies during COVID, initially as a way to share the instruments accumulating behind her at Lucky Now Studios, her home recording space in Scottsdale. Each episode profiles a single guitar — its history, its construction, its provenance — with a guest musician demonstrating what the instrument actually sounds like in capable hands. The 1938 Martin was among the first. Others followed: a 1966 Gibson Trini Lopez Deluxe, a mid-1960s Buck Owens Harmony guitar whose episode has reached 38,000 views, and eventually instruments with considerably heavier history attached to them.
A Martin D-28 owned and recorded by Steve Earle. A 1957 Stratocaster that once belonged to Waylon Jennings. A 1959 Martin D-18e whose specs, James says, match those of Kurt Cobain’s guitar — the one he played at Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged concert in New York — right down to the rare Bartolini pickup. Only 300 were made.
“I can feel the vibe coming from these instruments,” James says. “When I pick up a guitar that was owned by Steve or another artist, it changes the way I play. Something happens. You approach the instrument the way it feels in your hands.”
The Earle guitar came with a specific story. Earle used it recording “The Mountain,” a 1999 collaboration with Del McCoury that found him venturing deep into bluegrass territory. James eventually added “The Mountain” to her own live repertoire — playing it, she says, on the very instrument Earle used to record it. Last year, Del McCoury came through Phoenix for a date at the Musical Instrument Museum. James brought the guitar.
“He said, ‘Oh, I remember this — Steve had it on the tour,’” she recalls.
That exchange — the living chain of musicians, instruments, and stories — is precisely what VGL was built to document. The series has now taken James to a 40-year-old family-owned guitar shop in Pittsburgh, to Elderly Instruments in Lansing, Michigan, where founder Stan Werbin let her spend three days filming, and most recently to NAMM — the National Association of Music Merchants — in Anaheim, where she walked the convention floor with a cameraman and media credentials and came home with 16 episodes in three days.
“I don’t see many women doing what I do in the vintage guitar world,” she says. “There are a lot of guys out there, and I love them, but it’s fairly rare to find a woman talking seriously about these instruments. Sometimes there’s that initial reaction of, ‘What does she know?’ Well, I know quite a lot.”
The series has also drawn her into a deepening relationship with the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix — one of her first stops after moving to Arizona 12 years ago. Last year, she approached the MIM’s philanthropy office and donated two instruments from her personal collection: the 1957 Waylon Jennings Stratocaster and a 1936 Martin D-18, both in exceptional condition. The MIM’s curator, she says, looked at the Stratocaster and asked whether she was certain she wanted to part with it.
She was.
“It blesses me,” James says. “For me, it’s the giving. I wanted them to be curated and cared for in a place where thousands of people can enjoy them. The tour they gave me of the curator’s suite — getting a sneak peek into the bowels of that museum — was a genuinely touching moment for me.”
The performing life runs parallel to all of it. James plays the Cave Creek and North Scottsdale circuit regularly — Whiskey & Wings, Copper Bull Restaurant, Local Johnny’s, Raven’s View — as a solo act, as the Sarah James Duo, and fronting the Sarah James Project, a full band. She performs with the Desert Cats All-Star Band as well, a loose collective of Valley musicians whose upcoming date at Desert Mountain reflects how thoroughly she has embedded herself in the community since arriving from Pittsburgh. During summer months, James tours western Pennsylvania and New York — including a residency at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, N.Y., the landmark arts and education assembly where she performs, writes, and works on her craft.
“I love meeting people from all walks of life — bikers, golfers, bankers,” she says. “Music is the common denominator. It brings people together and lets them forget, for a moment, what they’re going through. That’s a beautiful thing.”
The songwriting came late — or rather, the recording of it did. James has been writing for years, but it wasn’t until about a decade ago that she committed fully to releasing music. Her latest single, “Swedish Machine” — a lighthearted song drawn from memories of traveling the Swedish countryside in an old Volvo — arrived on all streaming platforms in April. Before it, “Better Than This” surpassed 200,000 YouTube streams in just a few months.
It began one rainy Arizona night when she was sitting at her monitor, feeling melancholy, watching something unfold on the screen that she couldn’t quite believe.
“The lyrics started coming out of me: raindrops running down my window… And when I looked at that image, the thought came to me: shouldn’t we be better than this?”
She still writes lyrics by hand — old school, she says, because she’s a tactile person, because it helps. She brought the pages to Aaron Howard, her producer and longtime collaborator.
“He looked at them and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got something here,’” James recalls. “It started out as something folky and dirge-like, but by the time we were done, it became this anthem — it builds and builds.”
There’s a line in an earlier James song, “Take It or Leave It,” that functions almost as a thesis statement for this chapter of her life: The window’s closing fast now, got no time to f— around. She wrote it, she says, about exactly this — about growing older and bolder, about the things that call to you from under the bed while you’re raising a family and building a life, about the decision to finally answer.
Her heroes reinforce the point. She counts Ringo Starr — 85 and still actively touring — as a mentor, and saw him perform at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix last year.
“Music keeps me young and relevant,” she says.
James’ guitar was under the bed for a long time. She raised two kids, has grandchildren now, built a career in Pittsburgh before the desert took hold.
“I’m at a place in my life where I finally get to do what I want to do,” she says. “But it was always calling me. And now I’m at a station in life where I get to answer.”
She pauses, and then: “The windows may be closing fast, but I’m going to jump through them.”
sarahjamesmusic.com // youtube.com/@vintageguitarlegacies
Sarah James
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