Stu Cohen – founder of the Music Emporium, instrument authority, and world traveler – has passed away after a lengthy battle with recurrent lymphoma.
To anyone who met him, Stu was unforgettable…a throwback of the best kind. Between his trademark mustache, love for banjos, and appreciation for all things antique (he was proudly just the third owner of a farmhouse built in 1765), Stu seemed like a time traveler from some bygone era. But he was also deeply progressive and hilariously funny. My fondest NAMM memories consist of sitting next to him at the annual dealer dinners and hearing his running color commentary on new products that should have never seen the light of day.
When he didn’t have me laughing, Stu had stories galore from the early days of vintage wheeling and dealing. After serving in the Peace Corps in the 1960s, he attended grad school at the University of Pittsburgh. Before long, he was buying and selling folk instruments. When the Fretboard Journal had Steve Yarbrough pen a major feature on Stu and the Music Emporium for our 38th issue (I’ve included it below), Stu proudly sent me pics of him, back in the ‘60s, selling banjos out of the back of his VW Squareback at Galax. A lifelong foodie, he described his vintage guitar and banjo finds as “instrument foraging.”
Stu foraged for a half-century, meeting old-timer instrument collectors (including at least one Gibson teacher/agent from the 1920s), musicians of all stripes, and luthiers. He was an early champion of Bill Collings and Collings Guitars, and when the famed Austin maker started offering electrics, the shelves at TME embraced the trend. They still do.
“I do miss the shop and being around the younger generations,” Stu wrote me back in November, 2024, “particularly now with the two parallel universes of acoustics and electric. My purist focus and all the valuable electrics that I passed over!”
We’re going to miss you, Stu. -Jason
It Takes a Village: A Visit to the Music Emporium, the East Coast’s Shangri-La
by Steve Yarbrough
This story originally appeared in the Fretboard Journal #38
According to its founder, The Music Emporium—the venerable Lexington, Massachusetts, fretted instrument shop that’s about to celebrate its semicentennial—owes its existence, at least in part, to an event that happened more than half a century ago in an obscure Tanzanian village.
When he graduated from high school in Lowell, Massachusetts, Stu Cohen was like a lot of other American youths of the late 1950s and early ’60s. For a while he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. He enrolled in an engineering program at Lafayette College, then transferred to the University of New Hampshire, changing his major to psychology. Shortly before graduation, he saw some Peace Corps applications in the Student Union, and on a whim decided to apply, listing Tanzania as his first choice because he’d admired the film Hatari, which is set in the Serengeti. His familiarity with the principles of engineering led to an assignment building roads in the east African country.
“One Sunday, during a period when we were working in Tanga Province,” Cohen says, “I decided to go for a ride on my motorcycle. I came to this little village, where there’s this mud hut surrounded by red clay, with shutters instead of windows. The shutters were covered with delicately painted Tanzanian flags. The door was painted too. I liked how it looked, so I took a picture and went on my way. Sometime later, I again found myself in that village. There was a guy sitting in front of the hut with a pick ax and a piece of ebony. It turned out he was a refugee from Mozambique. The carving in progress looked like the figure of a man squatting. I’d always been into that kind of folky stuff, so I asked if it would be for sale. In Swahili, he said, ‘Yes, come back in a week.’ I go back a week later, and it’s finished, a beautiful carving. It’s on my night table right now. I saw that he was already working on something else that I couldn’t figure out, another piece of ebony, with cutouts in it. I asked what it was. He said, ‘Three legs. Come back in a week.’ When I went back, he had a big smile on his face as he showed it to me. It’s fashioned from a single piece of wood, but it’s a tripod, with carved heads on it and pieces that fold out and lock. I’d never seen anything like it. The idea that anybody could conceptualize what you’d need to do to create something like this just blew my mind. So I bought it, and it’s in our bedroom now too.”
After that, Cohen began to pay attention to the folk carvings being sold in Tanga. By the time he returned to the U.S. to start graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh, he had acquired a huge number of the pieces, many of them wildly modernistic, perhaps in part because of substances the wood-carvers liked to smoke while they worked. He shipped them home.
“Word got around Pittsburgh that I had all this interesting stuff, and quite a few people came over to see the carvings. This coincided with the inception of the Black Consciousness movement, and somebody in the art department at Carnegie Mellon asked if they could borrow some of them for an exhibition. Some other people who ran an art gallery in Shadyside, which is Pittsburgh’s version of Greenwich Village, also asked to display some of the carvings. I got to be friendly with them, and one day I happened to mention that my other great interest was folk instruments. These people owned the entire building that housed the gallery, and since not all of it was occupied, they thought maybe it would be nice to have a little music store there, too. I was already collecting instruments and advertising them for sale in the newsletters that dominated the trade in those pre-Internet days, so a friend of mine and I decided to open our first store. By then, I was out of grad school and working as director of research at the Urban League, so I hired someone to run the store, and after a year I realized this was going to work. We found a larger space on that same street. That’s when we got the Martin dealership.
“But if it hadn’t have been for those carvings,” Cohen says with a chuckle, “who knows? The Music Emporium might never have happened. Sometimes the planets just line up.”
*
An early customer of Cohen’s, Art Sanderson, fondly remembers the Pittsburgh shop. “In the late 1960s, The Music Emporium became a center for the folk music community in that city,” Sanderson says. “It was common for musicians and listeners to drop in and play, trade songs and meet new friends. Stu brought a depth of experience and authenticity to the folk experience. He spent many days on the backroads of West Virginia hunting for the right barn or attic with an old banjo waiting to be rediscovered.” Sanderson’s recollections suggest that Cohen’s encyclopedic knowledge of stringed instruments and his passion for them, along with his excellent people skills and his ability to make wise business decisions, have had at least as much to do with The Music Emporium’s success and longevity as the stroke of luck that Cohen himself so modestly credits.
Author of the seminal article “American Banjo Makers,” Cohen opened a second store in Cambridge in 1975, in partnership with banjo expert Jim Bollman and fingerstyle artist Eric Schoenberg. The Pittsburgh store remained in operation until 1982, at which time Cohen reluctantly made the decision to close it. His wife, Deane, had recently finished medical school, and he had moved back to Massachusetts with her in 1980. “The steel mills were closing down,” he says, “and considering the damage to the Pittsburgh economy, it made sense at the time to focus on the Cambridge store.”
Located first near Harvard Square and later, after a serious fire, some distance up Massachusetts Avenue in Porter Square, the shop quickly became an important destination for musicians, folk music enthusiasts, and the new crop of luthiers who would soon change the face of the fretted instrument business. One of these, Dana Bourgeois, vividly recalls the atmosphere that prevailed there.
“Back in the early ’80s,” he says, “The Music Emporium was my first guitar Mecca. Through TME, I gained exposure to the world of vintage instruments and got to know iconic acoustic guitarists. These experiences influenced my career in a profound way. I met Eric Schoenberg after hiring him to perform for a folk club that I ran in Bath, Maine. Prior to the show, one of his guitars needed some emergency setup. So when I fixed the guitar, Eric discovered another repair resource. Before long I was traveling to Boston every other week or so to pick up and deliver repairs and restoration projects. One entire wall of the shop was lined with ’30s Martins, Gibsons and Larsons, just barely graduated from used guitars to vintage guitars. The ones I worked on during that period are now some of the most valuable acoustics on the planet.
“I used to try to time my visits to take in weekend performances of whoever might be in town. Often the performers would end up at the Emporium, or at post-concert parties at Stu and Deane’s house. Through TME, I got to meet Tony Rice, Doc Watson, Norman Blake, Russ Barenberg, Tony Trischka, Andy Statman, John Miller, Matt Glaser, Alan Senauke and others. TME really was an Emporium of Music. From my point of view, it was also the center of the universe.”
One person drawn to The Music Emporium during its years in Porter Square was a young man named Joe Caruso, who’d grown up in nearby Woburn before moving with his parents to upstate New York. After earning an English degree from SUNY, Pottsdam, in 1987, Caruso had traveled around Europe, always accompanied by a guitar and sometimes a violin, too, while he eked out a living teaching English. Upon returning to the U.S., he founded a business in Rochester, New York, called Language Intelligence, which provided language instruction, translation and interpreting services. It was successful but somehow not fully satisfying, and in the meantime he’d become interested in guitar-building.
“One day,” Caruso says, “when I was back in the Boston area visiting my family, I was driving around Cambridge checking out various places to see if I could find a book I’d heard about on the building of steel-string guitars. I was waiting at a stoplight when I happened to see a place called The Music Emporium. So I found parking and went inside.” Though the store didn’t have the book, Caruso spoke with repairman Tom Stapleton, who told him about George Morris’ guitar school in Vermont. “I went up there and enrolled in the three-month course of study,” Caruso says, “and when I finished, I’d built a Martin-style M guitar. It’s hanging above my desk right now.”
He went to work at the shop, which due to troubles with the lease in Porter Square had by then moved to its current location in a Lexington shopping plaza. “The building had previously housed a pharmacy,” Caruso says, “and it bore all the earmarks of its former occupant: fluorescent lights, dropped ceiling, drawers for pill bottles. When we were remodeling, we kept finding things like old cans of Breck hairspray. The place where we greet customers—it’s still here—is a raised platform where the pharmacist used to dispense medication and wisdom.”
In 1997, Eric Schoenberg decamped for California to found Schoenberg Guitars. Caruso was able to buy Bollman’s share of the business in the early 2000s, and he and Cohen purchased Schoenberg’s share a few years later. In a sense, it might be fair to say that for Caruso, when he stopped at that traffic light in Porter Square more than two decades ago, the planets were again lining up.
*
These days, at the counter where prescriptions were once filled, it’s common to find Cohen or Caruso or another member of their small but expert staff examining a vintage Mastertone or admiring one of the many new instruments that arrive almost daily from boutique builders like Bourgeois, Collings, Froggy Bottom and Santa Cruz. No one who enters the shop would ever recognize it as a former pharmacy.
Relaxing on a leather sofa, sales manager Adam Dardeck puts it this way: “We’re trying to make it feel like your living room might if it were full of great guitars, mandolins and banjos.” Evidently, they have succeeded. Not long ago, one frequent patron told Cohen that his fondest dream was to find himself locked up alone in the shop every night for a week.
“Too many retail establishments,” Caruso says, “have nothing but product and a couple of people to take your money. We hope to provide more of a curated experience by offering instruments that we feel strongly about in a welcoming environment. If you take a pre-war Martin and hang it on a bare white wall, it’s a discordant image. We’ve given a lot of thought to how the place looks.” He gestures at an old French carpenter’s bench atop which several Lowdens rest in music stands. Caruso’s point is obvious: he wants the instruments to seem at home in their surroundings.
The first visit many potential buyers pay to the shop, though, is via its website. Both Dardeck and dreadnought specialist Andy Cambria, himself a master flatpicker, have undergraduate degrees in film studies and are attuned to the possibilities of visual storytelling. Cambria is a professional photographer, and he takes all of the instrument photos that appear on the website. Whereas the photography on the sites of many dealers is at best rudimentary and typically offers only three or four photos, Cambria tries to present something more, often including as many as 20 different views, with a mix of standard shots and close-ups.
“We’ve made the dimensions larger,” he says, “and gone to higher resolution. That leads to sharper photos, which is particularly important if they’re being viewed on a tablet or phone—and more often than not, they are. It instills confidence when people can look at, say, a Collings or a Bourgeois, brands that perhaps they were not aware of, and see how expertly the bindings were done, how finely the miters were cut.” Cambria also thinks the accompanying text, which he writes for all the shop’s acoustic instruments, is important. “With each description,” he says, “I’m trying to do at least two things. The first is to deal with the structural components: what materials were used in the construction of the instrument and, if it’s vintage, any repairs or modifications that might have occurred. The second is to convey, insofar as I can, what the instrument sounds like.”
His description for a new Collings OM2H-T reads: “Built with Madagascar Rosewood back & sides and an Adirondack Spruce top. The T Series guitars from Collings reflect Bill & Company’s desire to revive the classic building techniques of the 1930s, integrating them seamlessly with the modern standards of playability and finish work for which Collings sets the bar. This OM2H-T has a large, rumbling voice, and sounds considerably darker and more powerful than a standard Collings rosewood OM. It’s unquestionably lighter and more responsive as well. As part of the Traditional appointment package, each -T guitar is priced with Collings’ own handmade vintage-style hard case. An invigorating development from Austin!”
Dardeck says that some months as much as 65 percent of the shop’s sales occur online, though at other times the percentage might be as low as 30. But even when people walk in to play an instrument before buying, he says, they have almost always first looked at it online. “They use our website like a brochure,” he says. “It’s an extremely crucial part of what we do.”
*
On a recent weekday morning, Art Sanderson, who bought his 1925 Gibson Mastertone from Cohen in the Pittsburgh shop back in 1969, has driven up to Lexington from his home in Saratoga Springs, New York. A professor of electrical, computer and systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sanderson is accompanied by his wife and 15-year-old grandson, Justin, with whom he wants to try out some electric guitars. A few years ago, Cohen and Caruso, with plenty of input from Dardeck, decided to expand their selection of boutique electrics, adding instruments from some of the best builders like Grosh, Koll, Spalt and Swope to the Collings electrics they already stocked.
Cohen makes sure that Sanderson and his grandson receive plenty of attention. Over the next couple of hours they play numerous instruments, discussing their merits with a member of the staff. Though Cohen plans to take his old friend and his family to lunch, he stays out of the way while deliberations are in progress, going over invoices in his office and occasionally responding to messages or taking phone calls. Eventually, Sanderson decides to purchase a 2016 Collings 360 to use when jamming with Justin. He proudly notes that this makes him a loyal TME customer for 47 years.
Various words pop up time after time when one discusses Cohen and The Music Emporium with knowledgeable customers and business associates, and “loyal” is among the most frequent. A number of people also allude to the shop’s serving as a center, a place where the lives of musicians, music enthusiasts and builders of stringed instruments intersect. Others cite the expertise of Cohen, Caruso and their staff, their ability to build trust and make customers happy with their choices.
Few relationships have been as central to the success of all parties involved as the one forged over the last two decades between The Music Emporium and Collings Guitars. Steve McCreary, Collings’ general manager, says, “We’ve been doing business with the folks at The Music Emporium for well over 20 years. It’s pretty amazing to realize that they have been around for more than twice that long. The locations, staff and ownership have undergone changes over that time period, which is normal for any business, but the one constant has been Stu Cohen. A true Renaissance Man, Stu is as comfortable talking about hunting wild mushrooms and collecting folk art from around the world as he is discussing 100-year-old musical instruments—he’s a virtual encyclopedia on those topics, as well as many others. His 50 years of studying, collecting and selling is a history worth celebrating. And as for Joe Caruso, he’s set a course for the future.
“It’s difficult to explain just how valuable they are to a company like Collings. A store that has deep knowledge of both vintage and new instruments, they are able to handle questions regarding all of the instruments we build, which straddle both ends of that spectrum, given the addition of our Waterloo Guitars. Of course, the success of a business often comes down to who’s on the front line dealing with consumers. The folks that we speak with daily, Adam Dardeck and Andy Cambria, and less frequently ukulele expert Tim Mann and electric guitar specialist Eliot Hunt, are all extremely knowledgeable and are all good players. They are the ones who make their customers feel informed and comfortable in making the proper purchase. What more can you ask for?”
What more, indeed? At a time when retail is dominated by big-box stores that all stock the same products in generic environments, The Music Emporium calls to mind the days when people with names and faces owned and operated their own shops, knew their customers’ names and faces—as well as their tastes—and valued nothing above the chance to send them home happy, with a purchase they could love for the rest of their lives.
