Rock ’n’ roll has grown a lot in 50 years. So has this Lexington guitar shop.

This may be your reminder that 50 ain’t all that old.

When Bob Willcutt got into the guitar business, The Beatles were still a band, Jimi Hendrix was still alive, and Led Zeppelin I hadn’t come out yet.

Willcutt was getting into the rock ’n’ roll business before it was even considered a viable business. Electric guitars were in most instances relegated to a few options in the back corners of music shops that primarily sold pianos or band instruments.

“The idea of the guitar shop hadn’t really come into being yet,” he says.

That, of course, was 50 years ago.

Willcutt now enthusiastically presides over a sprawling guitar business that is deceptively modest in its public face.

Housed in a white 1926 house that started as a grocery store at the intersection of Rosement Garden and Southland Drive, Willcutt Guitars is a veritable candy store for guitar and bass players as well as musicians who favor rootsier instruments such as banjo and mandolin.

The centerpiece is the “Fender wall,” a custom, tiered display of dozens of Fender guitars — a few Gibsons, Gretsches and others slipped in — that is so well known in the guitar world Willcutt says Eddie Van Halen once stopped by to see it.

The shop is so well regarded that in the four-year history of the Lexington Music Awards, Willcutt has won the best instrument repair and customization shop every year, and the award for best musical instrument store all but once.

But what many local customers would not realize is that is just a fraction of the business. Diagonally across the street in a much more modern building — relative to the little white house customers visit —is the real headquarters of Willcutt, including its repair and customization shop, business offices and most importantly, its online sales hub.

Company president James Adkins says that 95 percent of Willcutt’s business is online, which Willcutt points out enables the company to offer prices competitive with national chains like Guitar Center, which has a Lexington store just a few miles down Nicholasville Road.

Yep, the market sure has changed since 1968.

At that point, Willcutt had been playing guitar for eight years, picking up the instrument when he was 12 to play folk tunes, and he had enjoyed some success, playing with a band called The Curfew, which had a Top 10 hit in Washington D.C. and opened for acts such as The Animals and Neil Diamond.

In 1966, he started school at the University of Kentucky and found Lexington was ultimately where he wanted to be. He continued playing, joining up with another band called One of Hours, but also discovered he loved working with guitars.

In the fall of 1968, he started looking around antique shops and finding old instruments that needed parts, so he went to Fred Moore Music Co..

“At that time, Freddie would have to order them in, and I’d go get them, and he said, ‘Why are you getting all these parts? What are you doing?’” Willcutt recalls. “When I told him, he said, ‘Well, I’ve got this whole room full of trade-ins that are piling up and need stuff done. Can you fix them?’”

Willcutt took them back to his apartment, repaired them and cleaned them, took them back the next day and Moore said, “You’re hired.”

That started Willcutt’s career, working out of Moore’s shop as a contractor for just over a decade, developing relationships with bluegrass stars such as J.D. Crowe and Ricky Skaggs, before he started looking for his own shop.

The house at Rosemont and Southland appealed to him for its New England hominess, but it took a while for the owners, who were running an antique shop there, to decide to sell. But in 1979, it became Willcutt’s guitar shop, though at the time, he was also dealing things like lighting and sound systems.

One thing that eluded Willcutt in his early years was the local franchises for marquee guitar makers such as Fender and Gibson, who at the time would only sell through one or two dealers in town. Now, most music shops in town carry those and other names.

But Willcutt built his reputation, both locally and nationally, dealing with lines such as Schecter, which coincidentally offered its first finished guitars in 1979, vintage guitars, and growing his reputation in service and repairs, often back stage at Rupp Arena shows for acts such as Kiss.

While Willcutt says the store doesn’t get a lot of celebrity traffic, artists such as guitar master Joe Bonamassa have been known to roll through.

Willcutt ended up opening some satellite stores in towns such as Richmond and Somerset for a time, but found it was better for the company to have it’s inventory in one place, particularly with the dawn of the internet.

“That’s when it all started to change,” says Willcutt.

Willcutt launched its first website in 1998, and it has since grown to a major guitar sales site that supports the local brick and mortar location. One letter turned out to be key, when he was advised to call it Willcutt Guitars instead of Guitar, because people tended to use the plural term when searching online for guitars.

Adkins says that while the local retail shop appeals to a broad spectrum of players from beginners to local professionals, the website has a stronger appeal to professionals and collectors. So, while it is an online storefront, he says there is a lot of interaction with customers by email and phone.

“If someone is going to give you $10,000 to ship them something, they want to talk to to someone and know that you’re legitimate,” Adkins says.

Now, Willcutt is one of the major Fender dealers in the country, as well as acoustic favorite Martin Guitars and others — so much so that representatives of companies such as Taylor Guitars, the Fender Custom Shop and Paul Reed Smith himself and others will be in for the 50th anniversary celebration May 12.

If rock ’n’n roll didn’t seem like much of a growth business in 1968, clearly, it had grown into something pretty big, and Willcutt has enjoyed the ride.

This story was originally published May 4, 2018 at 3:26 PM with the headline "Rock ’n’ roll has grown a lot in 50 years. So has this Lexington guitar shop.."