Gibson Archtop Guitars

Pieta Brown

01.01.70

Have a youthful sound with an old soul. Her voice is soft and airy, swooping around the melody like Edie Brickell, while her guitar taps into the classic cadences of country blues and Southern folk. Brown sounds so at home in this zone that it’s no surprise she comes from a long family lineage in music: her father is celebrated songwriter Greg Brown, her grandmother played guitar in church in southeastern Iowa, and her great-grandparents played banjo and pump organ.

During a vagabond childhood living with her mother after her parents split up, Pieta started writing very early—at five she was scribbling in a journal and making up songs at the piano. But she didn’t connect with the guitar, and find her groove as a songwriter, until she was in her mid-20s.

“I was in awe of guitars—they always seemed like mystical, magical instruments to me,” Brown says in a backstage conversation in Syracuse, New York, during a tour with Amos Lee. A turning point came during a visit with her dad when he gave her a 1930s May Bell archtop he’d just obtained. “I took it up to the room where I was staying that night, and everything converged,” she says. “I was in town for a couple weeks, and songs started coming out. I just tuned it to my ear, and it ended up being some kind of weird D-minor tuning. That’s when I got obsessed, and I’ve been in that obsessive zone since.”

Source: Acoustic Guitar