GUEST: I picked it up at auction. Wasn't really looking for anything in particular that night. It came up on stage, they asked ten dollars, and I bid, I got it.

APPRAISER: For ten dollars?

GUEST: For ten dollars. I knew Gibson as far as the name, but I didn't know anything about "The Gibson," so I really don't know anything about it.

APPRAISER: When did you go to this auction? What was the date?

GUEST: It's probably been six to eight months ago.

APPRAISER: So a pretty recent acquisition.

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: It's a 1928 guitar. That's as close as we could figure out when it was. The back and sides on this guitar are mahogany. It's a spruce top, and the finish is what they call a sunburst finish. So this is one of the better models. The way you date this guitar is the bracing on the inside is a pattern they call an H-bracing. So when Gibson switched from making the old style arch top guitars to the flat top guitars as they were developing their bracing system, the first iterations were the H-brace and the last iteration was what they call the X-brace, which they use up until today. The model is an L-1, but over the years it's been called the Robert Johnson model. Robert Johnson was a very famous blues musician in the South, and very few photographs of Robert Johnson, very few recordings of him, but you see Robert Johnson with a very similar guitar to this. The thing to make it a Robert Johnson guitar is you see the rounded lower bout and the shape of the bridge: the rectangular bridge with the extra raised area in the front of it. This has been modified slightly-- it has a bone saddle that's been put into it-- but they did it nicely. I think a guitar like this, Gibson guitar made in the late '20s from Kalamazoo, Michigan, would bring somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000 in a retail market.

GUEST: Oh, my gosh. Wonderful!

APPRAISER: So I'm going to start going to the auction with you.

GUEST: Yeah, I think I'll go back. That's fantastic!

APPRAISER: You always go back to the same fishing hole where you catch the big one, right?

GUEST: Exactly.