Meet the Maker: Frank Ford

by Jonathon Peterson

Originally published in American Lutherie #80, 2004 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015

See also,
Rebuilding a Rebuilt Headstock by Frank Ford

Hi, Frank. I have been wanting to do this for a long time. Just about everyone who is involved with guitar repair already knows something about you, either from magazine articles, appearances at conventions and schools, or from your web page, so I will dispense with the intro. Let’s start with where you grew up and how you first became interested in fretted instruments.

I was born and raised in the Bay Area. When I arrived at U.C. Santa Barbara to start college in ’62, I had not played any music at all. I got into listening to folk music and then bluegrass as part of that first rebirth of bluegrass that went through the college community in the early ’60s. My college roommate decided he was going to play banjo. Everybody laughed at him, but a year later he was a competent Scruggs-style banjo player. Some of my friends said, “Gee, you listen to so much music, you ought to play, too.” I was rather taken by The Country Gentlemen at the time, and Bill Monroe, and a few others, so I bought a mandolin and started to play.