The Penn Stater Magazine

Robert Earl Keen and the $65,000 Guitar

November 16, 2009 at 2:23 pm Tina Hay Leave a comment

Our story on Stan Jay ’65 from 1998.

I’m a bit of a fan of Robert Earl Keen, whose music I used to play when I hosted the WPSU Folk Show, so I was pleased to see the “Talk of the Town” article on him in this week’s New Yorker.

Better yet was discovering that the article turns out to be about a recent visit he paid to Mandolin Brothers, the legendary musical instrument store on Staten Island. Mandolin Brothers is owned by Stan Jay ’65, who majored in secondary education at Penn State and went on to sell guitars to everyone from Bob Dylan to Paul Simon to Peter Frampton. (We profiled Jay in the magazine way back in July-August 1998.)

Mandolin Brothers is an ideal store for someone like Robert Earl Keen—the New Yorker piece quotes him as saying, “A man can’t have too many guitars or too many shotguns.” Later in the article, Jay hands Keen a Martin 000-45 made in 1930, Keen plays it, Keen falls in love with it, and Jay quotes him the price: $65,000.

“Damn, I always go for the most expensive guitar in the place,” the story quotes Keen as saying, “and after that nothing else sounds as good.”

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: Famous Penn Staters, Penn State alumni, The Penn Stater magazine. Tags: Mandolin Brothers, Robert Earl Keen, Stan Jay, WPSU Folk Show.