Starry, Starry Night: McLean’ s Martin 00-21
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Starry, Starry Night: McLean’ s Martin 00-21
Don McLean wrote“ Vincent” on a 1969 Martin 00-21 while sitting on a veranda in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a Van Gogh biography in his lap and a print of The Starry Night on the table in front of him. The guitar sold at Christie’ s for $ 234,950 including buyer’ s premium.
McLean bought the guitar in 1969, after his D-28 was stolen at the Newport Folk Festival and the replacement he acquired felt inferior to the one he’ d lost. The 00-21 came to him through a different route entirely. He had been working shows with Josh White at the Cellar Door in Washington, D. C., just before White’ s death in September 1969, and became, in his own words, obsessed with the sound White got from his Martin 00-21. McLean bought two of them. He retrofitted one with Schaller tuners for easier stage use and eventually sold the other. The one he kept became part of what he called his“ first family of instruments”— the 00-21, his D-28, and his Vega banjo— and photographs from around 1970 show him with all three at his Hudson Valley gatehouse in Cold Spring, New York, looking entirely at ease.
The guitar’ s most consequential moment came in the autumn of 1970, when McLean was living in the Sedgwick House in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, working as a classroom musician for the Berkshire School District. He was reading a biography of Van Gogh one morning on the veranda, a print of“ The Starry Night” on the table in front of him, and the song arrived the way songs do when the conditions are right.“ I put down the book and picked up my guitar, which was never far away,” he wrote.“ 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.” The 00-21 was the guitar in his hands.
The Guitar That Wrote the Album Vincent and American Pie were the last tracks written for the album, recorded in May – June 1971 primarily at The Record Plant in New York.( American Pie was recorded on a Martin D-28, a distinction worth noting, since the two guitars are sometimes conflated.) McLean explained his preference for the smaller Martins in a 1972 Guitar Player interview:“ I like a really high, sharp treble, and a deep mellow bass, and the smaller Martins have that.”
Released as the album’ s second single in February 1972, Vincent reached number one in the UK and number 12 in the US Billboard Hot 100 and has outlasted most of what surrounded it. Its reach has been stranger than most songs of that era: it was reportedly played to Tupac Shakur in the hospital as he died from gunshot wounds in 1996. McLean’ s performance of Empty Chairs— another 00-21 recording— at the Troubadour in Los Angeles in 1971 moved a young Lori Lieberman so deeply that she wrote Killing Me Softly with His Song, which became a hit for Roberta Flack in 1973. A single guitar, a single autumn, a remarkable ripple effect.
132 | SPRING 2026