The Secret to a Hit Song? A Haunted Guitar.

This Old Thing highlights the stories behind notable Texans’ prized possessions. Shakey Graves’s prized 1931 Gibson L-7 was bestowed upon him during—what else?—a mushroom trip. As the artist (real name Alejandro Rose-Garcia) tells it, amid a psychedelic experience in 2009 he met a friend of a friend who decided that he had to give this instrument to the up-and-comer. The catch: It was supposedly haunted by its original owner, a World War II veteran named Jay Manley. Rose-Garcia later tried playing it, but it wouldn’t tune. He resolved to let it “do whatever it wanted to do” and found thathis hands “started to fly around the neck.” That phenomenon led him to write “Roll the Bones,” the title track of his 2011 debut record. He wrote…

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