My Dear Doctor Guitar,

After playing E♭ French Horn for many years with various symphonic orchestras, I tired of the same Bach-Beethoven-Brahms routine, decided to toss over the traces and start a new career in the Mississippi Delta as a bluesman.

Leaving Vienna with my life savings – enough to make me quite comfortable in my declining years – I settled in a small town I shall disguise by calling “Victor Delta.” There I met a most wonderful blues singer and guitar player called “Long Snake,” who offered to teach me everything he knew.

First, though, he informed me that I would need an instrument and that my beloved French Horn simply wasn’t suitable for the blues. He offered to sell me a guitar of his own manufacture, one he called a “Long Snake Slider,” complete with the necessary capos, slide capos, lever capos, thumbscrew capos, and poptop capos. This guitar was described by him as a “radial” and was, again according to Long Snake, probably the finest guitar crafted in the last seventy years. Truly, he said, it was one of a kind.

Naturally, I jumped onto his offer, my sole question being the tuning; I was informed that it used BADGAG. After my first lesson, however, two strings broke and I couldn’t find Long Snake anywhere to obtain replacements. Indeed, when I asked for him at his
office (he kept his office in a “jook joint” to be near the “real people”) one of his compatriots suggested that if I didn’t want to be used as catfish bait I’d cease asking
about Long Snake.

Hence, my questions to you. First, the guitar is a radial – does it matter if I get the steel wire from an 175SR14, or should I use another size? Secondly, why would a handcrafted guitar have a label reading “Made In Pakystann” inside its belly? Lastly, I trusted Long Snake with the control of my savings, since he said that that was the best way to have reason to sing the blues – would you have any idea of where he might be? I want to show him my new straight razor.

Sincerely yours,

Lucius D. Binch-Noir IV