In this blend of personal memoir and cultural history, National Public Radio commentator Tim Brookes narrates the long and winding history of the guitar in the United States as he recounts his own quest to build the perfect instrument.

Pairing up with a master artisan from the Green Mountains of Vermont, Brookes learns how a perfect piece of cherry wood is hued, dovetailed, and worked on with saws, rasps, and files. He also discovers how the guitar first arrived in America with the conquistadors before being taken up by an extraordinary variety of hands: miners and society ladies, lumberjacks and presidents’ wives. In time, the guitar became America’s vehicle of self-expression. Nearly every immigrant group has appropriated it to tell their story.