JIM IRSAY COLLECTION SUPPLEMENT
Where the Guitar Went McLean used the 00-21 on stage through late 1971, documented in footage from the PBS broadcast of Great American Dream Machine in November of that year, and at a Columbia University concert in December 1971 filmed for Robert Elfstrom’ s 1972 film Till Tomorrow: Don McLean in Concert. Then he gave the guitar to the young son of Alan Auanapu, skipper of Pete Seeger’ s Clearwater sloop. Auanapu’ s son held onto it for years before returning it to McLean ahead of a 2022 Julien’ s auction benefiting the Don McLean Foundation. Irsay acquired it there, adding it to a collection that already included some of the most storied guitars in American music. It sold at Christie’ s in the“ Icons of Popular Culture” session on March 13, 2026, the second day of the Irsay estate sale, for a mere $ 234,950, making it perhaps the greatest bargain of the event.
The 00-21 is not a grand instrument in the way that a pre-war D-45 is grand, or a Brazilian rosewood D-28 from the 1960s. It is a small-bodied workhorse, modest in its appointments, with the kind of focused projection and tonal clarity that suits fingerpicking and the intimate expression of a songwriter working ideas out in real time. McLean bought it because Josh White played one. He kept it because it suited what he needed to do. What he did with it, that autumn in Stockbridge, is why it ended up at Christie’ s— another chapter in the long afterlife of the objects that made the music.
Further reading: Don McLean: A Man and His Guitar( Collectible Guitar)
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