“He has this really old black acoustic that everybody has signed. It’s got Johnny Cash’s name scratched into it, and he had me sign it”: How a rite of passage led Margo Price to etching her signature onto a guitar next to a country legend’s

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Fresh off her partnership with Gibson on a signature J-45 acoustic signature guitar, country star Margo Price knows a thing or two about collaborations.

The guitarist and singer-songwriter has worked with the who’s who of the music world, including Bonnie Raitt, Mike Campbell, and Willie Nelson, to name just a few. Now, her autograph is etched forever on a guitar signed by many legends, including one of her idols, Johnny Cash.

So how did this come about? Well, one of Price’s co-songwriters on her upcoming album, Hard Headed Woman, Rodney Crowell, is a Nashville legend in his own right.

Aside from having had five number one singles on the Hot Country Songs chart, all from his 1988 record, Diamonds & Dirt, he also bagged two Grammys and has co-written with Keith Urban and Tim McGraw, among others.

Margo Price on ‘Hard Headed Women,’ and inauthenticity in mainstream country music | Broken Record – YouTube

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He was also married to Rosanne Cash between 1979 and 1992. So it’s perhaps because of this period that Crowell owns a guitar with Johnny Cash’s signature etched on it.

“We had so much fun over there that day, just swapping stories with him and passing the guitar around,” Price recalls of one of their songwriting sessions in an interview with Broken Record Podcast.

“And he has this really old black acoustic guitar that everybody has signed. It’s got Johnny Cash’s name scratched into it, and at the end of the write, he had me sign his guitar. It was like a rite of passage. And I had him sign mine, too.”

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Elsewhere in the interview, Price talks about her approach to guitar playing.

“Sometimes I don’t know chord names, but I know how to play them,” she asserts. “I mean, I know my circle of fifths, and there’s definitely been times where I’ve been able to kind of break through something that’s never been done, like Hands of Time is an A, but the chorus goes down, it modulates down to G.

“And when I initially wrote that song, my husband said, ‘I don’t think that works. That doesn’t sound right,’ but it gives the illusion that the key is being moved up, because I’m jumping up into my belting voice, but I’m actually modulating down.”

In more Margo Price news, the country star recently talked about playing Willie Nelson’s Trigger, and her prized Martin acoustic, signed by Nelson, Dolly Parton, and Kris Kristofferson.

Janelle is a staff writer at GuitarWorld.com. After a long stint in classical music, Janelle discovered the joys of playing guitar in dingy venues at the age of 13 and has never looked back. Janelle has written extensively about the intersection of music and technology, and how this is shaping the future of the music industry. She also had the pleasure of interviewing Dream Wife, K.Flay, Yīn Yīn, and Black Honey, among others. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her creating layers of delicious audio lasagna with her art-rock/psych-punk band ĠENN.