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Lot Essay
This 1970 Martin 00-21 acoustic guitar was used by American singer-songwriter Don McLean to record tracks for his breakthrough 1971 album American Pie, including the songs ‘Till Tomorrow’, ‘Winterwood’, ‘Empty Chairs’, ‘Sister Fatima’, and ‘The Grave’. Most notably, McLean used the 00-21 to write and record his enduring hit single ‘Vincent’, best known for its ethereal opening line Starry Starry Night, itself a reference to Vincent Van Gogh’s celebrated 1889 painting The Starry Night. The guitar also served as his primary stage guitar for live performances from late 1970 through 1971.
According to McLean’s 2012 autobiography American Troubadour, he purchased a Martin 00-21 after his beloved D-28 was stolen at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1969 and replaced with a second that he felt was inferior to the one he had lost. Previously devoted to the Martin D-28, McLean became intrigued by the 00-21 model played by prominent blues musician Josh White when the pair worked shows together at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., just prior to White’s death in September 1969. McLean writes: I used the second D-28 a lot, for performing and writing, and then I was heavily into Josh White, so I bought a Martin 00-21, the guitar I used for a lot of those opening act shows in ’69. Reportedly McLean bought two Martin 00-21s, retrofitting this 1970 model with new Schaller tuners to enable easier tuning on stage, and eventually selling the other. Interviewed for Guitar Player magazine in 1972, McLean explained why the traditional short-scale Martins worked so well for him: I like a really high, sharp treble, and a deep mellow bass, and the smaller Martins have that. In American Troubadour, McLean writes that the Martin 00-21, along with the D-28 and his Vega banjo, would make up his first family of instruments, and is seen contentedly strumming a 00-21 alongside the other two cherished instruments in archive photographs shot at his Hudson Valley gatehouse in Cold Springs, New York, circa 1970.
A bittersweet reverie on Van Gogh’s life and work, McLean recollects that he wrote ‘Vincent’ in autumn 1970, while he was working as a classroom musician for the Berkshire School District and living in the Sedgwick House in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I was sitting on the veranda one morning, reading a biography of Van Gogh, and suddenly I knew I had to write a song arguing that he wasn’t crazy. He had an illness and so did his brother Theo, recalled McLean in an interview with The Telegraph in 2010. The more I thought about it, writes McLean on his website, the more interesting and challenging the idea became. I put down the book and picked up my guitar, which was never far away, and started fiddling around, trying to get a handle on this idea, while the print of ‘Starry Night’ stared up at me. Looking at the picture, I realized that the essence of the artist’s life is his art. And so, I let the painting write the song for me.
That’s the way that I write songs, McLean told Guitar Player in 2026. I come up with the melody and lyrics together, usually. Once I get a little piece of action going, I can decide where I want to go with it… ‘Vincent’ is basically me and the guitar, recorded as a live version… That means that what you get is exactly how the guitar wraps itself around my voice as I’m playing through the song. It creates a single entity, and that’s what I do. ‘Vincent’ and ‘American Pie’ were the last tracks to be written for the album, which was recorded May-June 1971 at The Record Plant in New York. As well as ‘Vincent’, McLean used this Martin 00-21 to record the songs ‘Till Tomorrow’, ‘Winterwood’, ‘Empty Chairs’, ‘Sister Fatima’, and ‘The Grave’. McLean told The Telegraph that the love ballad ‘Empty Chairs’ was similarly inspired by Van Gogh’s painting of a chair. His moving performance of ‘Empty Chairs’ at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles in 1971, as witnessed by young folk singer Lori Lieberman, would itself inspire the song ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song’, which described Lieberman’s strong emotional response to the music: And there he was this young boy / A stranger to my eyes / Strumming my pain with his fingers / Singing my life with his words / Killing me softly with his song. The song would become a smash hit when recorded by Roberta Flack in 1973 and covered by the Fugees in 1996. I thought that was beautiful, McLean told Brown. I was humbled by it. I’m glad that my music has helped other people as it’s helped me. It makes me glad that I did what I did with my life.
Led by McLean’s chart-topping magnum opus ‘American Pie’, the album of the same name was released to wide acclaim in October 1971, hitting number one on the US Billboard 200 and was certified gold within six months. Released as the album’s second single in February 1972, ‘Vincent’ was a bigger international hit than ‘American Pie’, reaching number one in the UK and number 12 in the US, and remains one of McLean’s best loved songs. A particular favorite of Tupac Shakur, the song was reportedly played to him in hospital as he died of his gunshot wounds from a drive-by shooting in 1996. The success of American Pie made McLean an international star and led to renewed interest in his first album, which charted more than two years after its initial release. Based on surviving footage and photographs, it appears that McLean used the Martin 00-21 for live performances through to late 1971, including an appearance on the television show Great American Dream Machine, broadcast on PBS on 3 November 1971, and a concert at Columbia University on 10 December 1971, which was filmed for the 1972 Robert Elfstrom film Till Tomorrow: Don McLean in Concert. McLean then gave the Martin 00-21 to the young son of Alan Auanapu, skipper of Pete Seeger's Clearwater sloop, who held on to it for many years until the guitar was returned to McLean ahead of his auction to benefit the Don McLean Foundation in 2022.
REFERENCES
R. Albero and F. Styles, ‘Don McLean: Exclusive Interview’, Guitar Player, Vol. 6, No. 5, July/August 1972.
H. Brown, ‘Don McLean interview: why I had to write 'Vincent’, The Telegraph, 24 February 2010. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/7264618/Don-McLean-interview-Why-I-had-to-write-Vincent.html.
D. Kawashima, ‘Special Interview With Don McLean, Renowned Singer/Songwriter Of “American Pie” and Other Classic Songs’, Songwriter Universe, 3 July 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20180226152017/http:/www.songwriteruniverse.com/don-mclean-interview-2017.htm.
D. McLean, interviewed by Norman Harris, ‘Don McLean (American Pie) playing a 1954 Martin 00-21 at Norman’s Rare Guitars’, posted 8 August 2017, by Normans Rare Guitars, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_7ENKi6eGc.
D. McLean, ‘Vincent (Starry Starry Night)’, Don McLean, 11 July 2019. https://donmclean.com/vincent-starry-starry-night/.
M. McStea, ‘How a 1970s rock legend scored his second career-defining hit’, Guitar Player, 8 January 2026. https://www.guitarplayer.com/guitarists/how-don-mclean-scored-his-second-big-hit-after-american-pie.
According to McLean’s 2012 autobiography American Troubadour, he purchased a Martin 00-21 after his beloved D-28 was stolen at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1969 and replaced with a second that he felt was inferior to the one he had lost. Previously devoted to the Martin D-28, McLean became intrigued by the 00-21 model played by prominent blues musician Josh White when the pair worked shows together at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., just prior to White’s death in September 1969. McLean writes: I used the second D-28 a lot, for performing and writing, and then I was heavily into Josh White, so I bought a Martin 00-21, the guitar I used for a lot of those opening act shows in ’69. Reportedly McLean bought two Martin 00-21s, retrofitting this 1970 model with new Schaller tuners to enable easier tuning on stage, and eventually selling the other. Interviewed for Guitar Player magazine in 1972, McLean explained why the traditional short-scale Martins worked so well for him: I like a really high, sharp treble, and a deep mellow bass, and the smaller Martins have that. In American Troubadour, McLean writes that the Martin 00-21, along with the D-28 and his Vega banjo, would make up his first family of instruments, and is seen contentedly strumming a 00-21 alongside the other two cherished instruments in archive photographs shot at his Hudson Valley gatehouse in Cold Springs, New York, circa 1970.
A bittersweet reverie on Van Gogh’s life and work, McLean recollects that he wrote ‘Vincent’ in autumn 1970, while he was working as a classroom musician for the Berkshire School District and living in the Sedgwick House in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I was sitting on the veranda one morning, reading a biography of Van Gogh, and suddenly I knew I had to write a song arguing that he wasn’t crazy. He had an illness and so did his brother Theo, recalled McLean in an interview with The Telegraph in 2010. The more I thought about it, writes McLean on his website, the more interesting and challenging the idea became. I put down the book and picked up my guitar, which was never far away, and started fiddling around, trying to get a handle on this idea, while the print of ‘Starry Night’ stared up at me. Looking at the picture, I realized that the essence of the artist’s life is his art. And so, I let the painting write the song for me.
That’s the way that I write songs, McLean told Guitar Player in 2026. I come up with the melody and lyrics together, usually. Once I get a little piece of action going, I can decide where I want to go with it… ‘Vincent’ is basically me and the guitar, recorded as a live version… That means that what you get is exactly how the guitar wraps itself around my voice as I’m playing through the song. It creates a single entity, and that’s what I do. ‘Vincent’ and ‘American Pie’ were the last tracks to be written for the album, which was recorded May-June 1971 at The Record Plant in New York. As well as ‘Vincent’, McLean used this Martin 00-21 to record the songs ‘Till Tomorrow’, ‘Winterwood’, ‘Empty Chairs’, ‘Sister Fatima’, and ‘The Grave’. McLean told The Telegraph that the love ballad ‘Empty Chairs’ was similarly inspired by Van Gogh’s painting of a chair. His moving performance of ‘Empty Chairs’ at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles in 1971, as witnessed by young folk singer Lori Lieberman, would itself inspire the song ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song’, which described Lieberman’s strong emotional response to the music: And there he was this young boy / A stranger to my eyes / Strumming my pain with his fingers / Singing my life with his words / Killing me softly with his song. The song would become a smash hit when recorded by Roberta Flack in 1973 and covered by the Fugees in 1996. I thought that was beautiful, McLean told Brown. I was humbled by it. I’m glad that my music has helped other people as it’s helped me. It makes me glad that I did what I did with my life.
Led by McLean’s chart-topping magnum opus ‘American Pie’, the album of the same name was released to wide acclaim in October 1971, hitting number one on the US Billboard 200 and was certified gold within six months. Released as the album’s second single in February 1972, ‘Vincent’ was a bigger international hit than ‘American Pie’, reaching number one in the UK and number 12 in the US, and remains one of McLean’s best loved songs. A particular favorite of Tupac Shakur, the song was reportedly played to him in hospital as he died of his gunshot wounds from a drive-by shooting in 1996. The success of American Pie made McLean an international star and led to renewed interest in his first album, which charted more than two years after its initial release. Based on surviving footage and photographs, it appears that McLean used the Martin 00-21 for live performances through to late 1971, including an appearance on the television show Great American Dream Machine, broadcast on PBS on 3 November 1971, and a concert at Columbia University on 10 December 1971, which was filmed for the 1972 Robert Elfstrom film Till Tomorrow: Don McLean in Concert. McLean then gave the Martin 00-21 to the young son of Alan Auanapu, skipper of Pete Seeger's Clearwater sloop, who held on to it for many years until the guitar was returned to McLean ahead of his auction to benefit the Don McLean Foundation in 2022.
REFERENCES
R. Albero and F. Styles, ‘Don McLean: Exclusive Interview’, Guitar Player, Vol. 6, No. 5, July/August 1972.
H. Brown, ‘Don McLean interview: why I had to write 'Vincent’, The Telegraph, 24 February 2010. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/7264618/Don-McLean-interview-Why-I-had-to-write-Vincent.html.
D. Kawashima, ‘Special Interview With Don McLean, Renowned Singer/Songwriter Of “American Pie” and Other Classic Songs’, Songwriter Universe, 3 July 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20180226152017/http:/www.songwriteruniverse.com/don-mclean-interview-2017.htm.
D. McLean, interviewed by Norman Harris, ‘Don McLean (American Pie) playing a 1954 Martin 00-21 at Norman’s Rare Guitars’, posted 8 August 2017, by Normans Rare Guitars, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_7ENKi6eGc.
D. McLean, ‘Vincent (Starry Starry Night)’, Don McLean, 11 July 2019. https://donmclean.com/vincent-starry-starry-night/.
M. McStea, ‘How a 1970s rock legend scored his second career-defining hit’, Guitar Player, 8 January 2026. https://www.guitarplayer.com/guitarists/how-don-mclean-scored-his-second-big-hit-after-american-pie.