THEME

Today’s Dispatch comes from my hometown in rural Pennsylvania on Thanksgiving Day in 1988. I was twelve years old, and doing my best to avoid food-prep chores when the doorbell rang. It was Brian, a friend of my dad’s, who had recently been baptized at the Brethren in Christ Church my family attended. The Brethren are full-immersion dunkers, and had an oversized bathtub installed directly under the altar, accessible by a trap door. Pastor Rick forgot to heat the water before the morning service, so Brian’s proclamation of faith was a particularly dramatic affair. After his third dip, he gasped and shivered through pledges to remove temptations of all sorts from his life.

Standing outside our family home, Brian revealed that one of his temptations was an extensive collection of vinyl records, which he decided to gift me. He passed me a hand trolley, lowered the tail gate of his pickup truck, tore off a plastic tarp that would contain a deer carcass later that season, and said, “ OK, kid, have fun.” The records were piled high in a series of cardboard boxes with the Chiquita Banana logo. Apparently, Brian and, for once, my parents found themselves unbothered by how those boxes of temptation might negatively impact my moral fiber, and to this day I remain grateful for their oversight.

After green bean casserole and pumpkin pie, the fancy dishes were washed, and I was free to start in on the banana boxes. The discovery process began with the usual suspects: the Doors, the Beatles, the Stones. But at the bottom of the first box was a record cover featuring the profile of a handsome, pouty-faced man, with the title Parkening Plays Bach in bold white and orange lettering. I thought the man in the photo looked a bit like Harrison Ford, and the prospect of Han Solo playing the music of Bach piqued my curiosity, so I dropped the needle. About 45 seconds into the first track, I forgot about all the other records.

VARIATION 1

Parkening Plays Bach was released by Angel Records, a Capitol/EMI subsidiary, in 1972. Christopher Parkening was in his mid-20s and had already recorded three other albums for the label. His playing is confident and mature, and there’s a freshness to his interpretations that is unusual for classical guitar records of that time period. The looming, grandfatherly presence of the era’s dominant guitar figure, Andres Segovia, is barely detectable. Parkening places Bach’s melodic material squarely on the beat, and doesn’t go ham with the rolled chords and swooping portamenti that permeate Segovia’s 1969 Bach album. The influence of John Williams—six years Parkening’s senior and a fellow star pupil in the Segovia lineage—is far more apparent. The Williams influence is particularly present in Parkening’s sound, which is warm yet direct. That’s thanks in part to the 1967 cedar-top MT Ramirez guitar he plays on the record, which is currently on display to be seen but not heard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

For me, the standout track on the album is Rick Foster’s arrangement of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” from Cantata BWV 147. It’s a deceptively tricky arrangement. Foster set the material in the key of C, which limits the availability of open bass strings, so producing any semblance of legato requires prolonged contact with the fretboard. That means by the first repeat of the A section, the left hand is pooped, and there are still two minutes to go in the piece. Parkening makes tidy work of Foster’s arrangement, and considering they were cutting the record onto two-inch magnetic tape controlled by massive reel-to-reels, I can’t imagine there were many edits in those sessions.

Parkening Plays Bach was an immediate success, and helped establish the young American guitarist squarely alongside the likes of Segovia and John Williams at the peak of Mount Classical Guitar. But there were early indications that a conventional, public-facing career with up to 90 concerts annually was ill-suited to Parkening’s demeanor. In one bizarre incident, he cut off his nails in the middle of a tour in what he called an “act of self-sabotage.” Now, if you’re not familiar with the classical guitar, cutting off your right-hand fingernails in the middle of a tour may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Right-hand nails are the primary way we guitarists produce a sound, so Parkening’s move was basically the equivalent of a pop singer showing up to Coachella and refusing to use a microphone. I’ve devoted a not-insubstantial number of hours to imagining how concert organizers and the PR team at Columbia Artists Management began squirming as one of the most recognizable faces on their artist roster began to fray at the edges.

The fraying eventually unraveled, leading to a 4-year wholesale retreat from the planks. As far as retreats go, Parkening pretty much set the industry standard. He bought a ranch in Montana, announced his retirement at the ripe old age of 30, and devoted his time to fly fishing. During this period, he attended a service at Grace Community Church, then pastored by John F. MacArthur, a forefather of the megachurch phenomenon in the U.S. MacArthur’s charisma and on-air presence helped grow the congregation, doubling its tithing intake every two years or so. “Parkening, caught up in the fervor, got religion in a big way. Though Grace Community Church is a full-immersion dunking environment, Parkening had already been baptized as a baby, so his conversion was of a dry sort. To the best of my knowledge, he did not give his record collection away to a 12-year-old kid.

When it was time to once again earn a living, Parkening’s “early retirement” was amended to “hiatus.” But even that decision happened on his terms:

“It became evident that the Lord wanted me to return to playing the guitar again, but this time for a different purpose—to honor and glorify my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!”

Parkening’s first offering to the lord was the 1982 LP, Simple Gifts, which features solid guitar playing and innovative arrangements. I’m partial to the charming adaptation of the title track on that album. It’s a hoot to play, and requires the performer to detune the sixth string by a whole step from D to C with the left hand, while the right hand keeps things moving with open strings just before launching into the final variation.

VARIATION 2

In the church community I grew up in, Parkening’s conversion was regarded as a win for the home team. I recall a counselor at church camp using Christopher Parkening’s Simple Gifts album as Exhibit A to prove that Parkening was “God’s chosen guitarist.” “And,” he added, “just imagine how cool Heaven would be if we only got to Jimi Hendrix sooner.”

As the 80s turned into the 90s, I graduated from compulsory church camp to voluntary guitar camp. I was disoriented to find myself in a community that, if they regarded Parkening at all, did so with a modicum of distaste. The narrative, as I understood it, was that Parkening started out with promise but traded his artistic integrity to shill for Jesus. It must have been a convincing narrative, because I managed to finish three degrees, perform, compose, and teach for 25 years before I spared Christopher Parkening another thought. In those intervening years, Parkening managed to shoehorn some rather disparate interests into a long and impressive career, including, but not limited to, a win at the International Gold Cup Tarpon Fly Fishing Tournament, solo appearances with the London Philharmonic and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a string of appearances on the Today Show (to my knowledge, the only classical guitarist ever featured on the program), and a collaboration with soprano Kathleen Battle that produced several albums, my favorite of which is Angels’ Glory, a worthy inclusion on any Christmas playlist.

I never went in for the whole baptism thing, which is one of the reasons I don’t talk to my family much. Well, it’s the reason they don’t talk to me. But a while ago, I was granted a temporary reprieve and welcomed back to Pennsylvania to provide pro bono wedding music and to retrieve a few boxes my parents had discovered while selling their home. It was a rough trip, and it ended abruptly, so the boxes sat in the trunk of my car for a couple of weeks before I could muster the wherewithal to unpack them. When I eventually did, I was surprised to find the handsome, pouty-faced man once again looking up from the bottom of a Chiquita banana box and in reasonably good shape. He looks to me like a young man now. A bit warped and moldy around the edges, but after 38 years, I suppose we should all expect to take on some damage. Under the right conditions, vinyl records and banana boxes can be surprisingly resilient. They can be found, and lost, and found again. Still, it’s best to handle these things with care.

CODA

Well, that’s all for today’s Classical Guitar Dispatch. I’m on the road for the next two weeks for concerts and teaching, including a stop at one of my favorite guitar events on the planet, the Classical Guitar Retreat in St Andrews, Scotland, where I will perform with my duo partner Matthew McAllister, alongside our friends the Magma Guitar Duo from Iceland. Matthew will also debut a new solo work I wrote for him, titled “An Awakening,” which you can hear on Matthew’s upcoming album on Sacred Black Records.

So, if you’re listening to this podcast in June of 2026, the next episode will come out July 17th and will feature conversations with current and former members of the legendary Los Angeles Guitar Quartet for a career retrospective spanning 46 years and counting.

Head over to the Classical Guitar Dispatch on Substack for show details, extended interviews, full transcripts, and playlists. While you’re there, hit the subscribe button; it’s much appreciated. As always, I want to hear from you, so

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Erscheinungs­datum: 26.6.2026, 08:00:00