NEWS + NOTES
INQUIRER
JONATHAN WILSON
THE AMERICANA ARTIST TALKS NASHVILLE, HIS MUSICAL FATHER, TOURING WITH ROGER WATERS AND PERFECTING YOUR CRAFT
Jonathan Wilson and his Strat on stage in September 2018
FRANCESCO PRANDONI/REDFERNS
Got my first real six-string…
I got my first proper guitar as a combined Christmas/13th birthday present, a black Squier Stratocaster with a Squier 15 amplifier. I could already play because my dad had an amateur band and he had several acoustics at the house. His band were playing the British Invasion stuff — they were that generation of kids who saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. I was sounding decent for a youngster and got a lot of encouragement from my family to keep it up. That made me realize I could pursue this beyond just playing for fun in my bedroom. My own first acoustic guitar was a 1962 Gibson J-50 I bought in the Nineties for $1,000 plus some trade-ins. It’s my main acoustic — that thing’s fantastic.