Remember the pickup games when you were a kid? Two captains, everybody else lined up, waiting to hear their name. You know the difference between being picked last and being picked first.
This fall, we got picked first.
Nashville recently hosted the 2026 SEUS-Japan Conference. It’s a gathering of business and government leaders from Japan and the Southeastern states, and this was the first time in 15 years that Tennessee served as host. By tradition, the conference closes with an exchange of gifts. The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development wanted something that would speak for Tennessee: its craftsmanship and its music. In a state with every musical option imaginable, they called us.
On October 27, at the closing ceremony, former Governor Bill Haslam presented two custom Gallagher guitars to the Japanese co-chairs, Yasuhiro Morita of Bridgestone Corporation and Masaaki Tsuya of the Japan-USSE Association. They were all smiles.
This wasn’t Gallagher’s first trip to Japan. In 1974, the same year Gallagher introduced the Doc Watson model, the shop sent its first guitars to Japan. There were nine of them. Japanese musicians had embraced bluegrass since the 1950s, and in the fifty years since, many more Gallaghers have made that journey. Now two more have.
We built two matching Grand Auditorium guitars for the occasion. The backs and sides are American black walnut. The tops were red spruce. The SEUS-Japan emblem is inlaid on each headstock.
The binding has the best story of all, and it was told from the stage that day. Three blocks from our shop, a holly tree more than 200 years old stood in front of a historic home. The tree was so beloved that the house was named for it: the Holly House. When a storm damaged the tree, its owner asked that the wood not be lost, but given new life. We milled it into binding, and now a piece of Murfreesboro history travels to Japan.
Our thanks to the SEUS-Japan Committee and TNECD for choosing Gallagher to help represent Tennessee. It’s a feeling we won’t forget.
