May 23rd, 2008
An Elegy for Tom
The loss of Thomas Humphrey last Wednesday, April 16, 2008, leaves a void so big that no one and nothing can fill it, nothing that is except the Paul Bunyan sized, the bigger- than- life- sized memory of this quintessentially American giant who gave to the world of guitar making a legacy as big as his own rollicking personality and stratospherically creative imagination.
During the 3 decades of our long friendship I was occasionally asked by the press to describe Tom to the uninitiated. I used to say what I would still say today: he was out of the tradition of the great American inventors like Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone (“What hath God wrought?”) or Thomas Edison, who when he made the first light bulb, famously stared at it for 48 hours straight!
Like many other guitar players, I too in my early years in New York City revolved in and out of Tom’s famous 72nd St. workshop and apartment thrilling to each unpredictable zig and zag of his febrile luthier’s fantasy. Many guitar builders work slowly and methodically, carefully changing small details in a life- long, disciplined controlled experiment. Their work can resemble a practically monastic search for the Holy Grail. Not so Tom. Some totally new idea would come to him – like the famous Millenium design which announced itself in a dream— and off he would go on some previously unknown, wild horse of an idea, laughing at each wild jolt along the way as he charged fearlessly into uncharted guitaristic territory.
But Tom was more than just an inspired guitar maker. Perhaps because he had lost his own father early in life, Tom had an unbelievable sensitivity to and love for young guitarists or for anyone going through a tough time. My wife and I can never forget Tom’s kindness to us when we had just come back to the United States in the summer of 2000. No one was more loving or more sympathetic or gave us more hope for the future than Tom and his beautiful wife, Marta.
The stories of the countless young players Tom befriended, nurtured and mentored are too numerous to recount here, but the list of important players and teachers who found unsuspected musical possibilities through the grace of his instruments is like a “Who’s Who” of the classical guitar in the closing decades of the 20th century. People like Odair and Sergio Assad, Sharon Isbin, Ben Verdery, Michael Newman, Laura Oltman, David Starobin, David Tanenbaum, Lili Afshar, Peter McCutcheon, Vladimir Mikulka, Ernesto Tamayo, Costas Cotsiolis, Roger Cope, Bruce and Adam Holzman, Tom Johnson, myself and dozens of others all played countless concerts and made numerous recordings on various generations of Humphrey guitars. In short, Tom recreated in his work the big, boisterous, decentralized extended family he had known as a child growing up in Minnesota.
Of course Tom also created a new human family all his own when he married his lovely, Brazilian wife, Marta, who gave him 2 precious daughters, Gabriella and Adriana, who have grown to be as lovely as the famous, flamed jacaranda that graced the sides and backs of so many of his beloved guitars.
Tom had moved out of his New York City digs in the 1990’s, buying a gorgeous piece of property near Gardiner, New York, with water running through it and a breathtaking view of the famous “ridge”, a huge expanse of variegated, exposed rock to rival the Grand Canyon. In fact, Bruce Holzman and I used to call Tom’s place “Ponderosa East”! On this property Tom had a whole crew of horses, two scrappy, yapping little dogs, and a number of cats, all of whom shared the huge tract of land with the innumerable revolving guests who came through and very often stayed for long periods of time.
As we drove away from the final reception after Tom’s memorial service, Zaira and I drove past this place for the first time without Tom in it. But we immediately turned back on impulse and stopped and walked onto the grounds and once or twice around the house, even peering in at the workshop to see if it might have all been some cruel cosmic mistake and he might still be there.
Memories flooded in: Tom in his workshop, myself walking with Tom through the unending grounds as he expounded on some new idea, our daughter Raquel riding the horses as Tom or one of his daughters led, ourselves jumping up and down on that huge trampoline Tom put out back, the many meals that Marta would conjure up out of nowhere… too many good times to ever remember them all at once.
And I thought to myself, “This house is here, this barn, this shed for the horses are all here because Tom dreamed them up and put them there, just like his instruments.” And although I knew I’d never again hug him as he came smiling out the front door to greet us, somehow he didn’t seem gone at all. Instead his being seemed to be all around us, smiling down from the great ridge and bubbling out of the clear brook and cavorting on the grass: the unforgettable companion whose presence lit up all our lives (even we didn’t know how much till now!) that unique personality wide as the American prairie, his imagination as far out as space…. And it seems to me now writing this that his soul still shines down on those of us who knew and loved him, leaving in its warm afterglow an abiding love that will never leave us.