In 1964, when Dunlop was a Stanford undergrad, he found a 1947 vintage Martin D-18 in a San Francisco music store.

“I saw an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle for the Martin guitar,” recalls Dunlop, a retired U-M Flint philosophy professor. “I went into the city to check it out and bought it from them.” He paid about $300.

At first he played folk music, but in 1969, while teaching at the University of North Carolina, he was introduced to bluegrass.

“Once I heard bluegrass, I wanted to learn that style of playing, where the guitar picking is done with a plectrum rather than with the fingers of the right hand,” he says. The southern string-band music also “is often at a fast tempo, which, in my honest opinion, makes it more exciting.”

Dunlop’s search for his missing Martin led him to a musical instrument repairman in Madison and then to a musician in Texas. The Texan had several of his own guitars stolen and figured selling it back to Dunlop might be good karma.

And he had the right guitar: “Most bluegrass artists either play a Martin guitar or aspire to play one,” he says. He had custom alterations made at the Martin factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, to tailor his for bluegrass jam sessions.

The instrument moved with him to jobs at Duke University and the University of Illinois-Chicago. But in 1972, his Chicago apartment was broken into and vandalized.

“I had a pretty high-end audio system and amplifiers and FM tuners. That was all gone. I have some really large speakers; they’re almost the size of a refrigerator. The thieves tried to move those out the door, but they were just too big for them to carry.” They got the Martin, though, along with “a violin that I inherited from my father.”

Dunlop joined the U-M Flint faculty the same year and moved to Ann Arbor in 1981. He purchased a 1951 Martin to play and never saw any of his other stolen possessions again. But in 2021 he got his original Martin back.

“At the time it was stolen, there was no internet. So I was searching for the guitar, but if it hadn’t been for the man who bought it and kept it for about forty-eight years before he decided to put it back together, I would have never seen it again.”

The first break came in 2019, when Dunlop emailed the Martin company. They were able to locate the serial number of the missing guitar. Two years later, an online search for the serial number brought up an eBay sale.

“When I read the description, it mentioned the exact serial number and said it was a 1947 Martin guitar,” Dunlop says. “I figured I found it. But it turned out, of course, that the eBay sale was already over, and somebody else had bought the guitar. So that was a very complicated situation.”

Dunlop wrote an article about his search for Bluegrass Unlimited magazine. It quoted the eBay ad’s description of the extensive abuse the guitar had suffered after it was stolen:

“The person that I bought it from shall remain un-named (but he was a well known R & R guitar player in the late 60’s to mid 1970’s),” wrote the seller, a longtime instrument repairman in Madison, Wisconsin. “He had absolutely NO respect for this wonderful guitar and almost destroyed it. The original back was Honduras Mahogany and the owner smashed it. He later replaced the smashed back with a piece of Masonite that he glued on with epoxy. He once again attempted to smash the Masonite back but he only succeeded in cracking the sides, breaking the neck at the [heel] and pulling the bridge off along with some of the top under the bridge.”

The seller, Dunlop wrote in Bluegrass Unlimited, “went on to catalog various repairs that he had made, which had brought the horribly abused instrument back to life, even if not to its former state. Nonetheless, the sight of my old guitar in eBay photos, plus the seller’s declaration that it was ‘very solid,’ encouraged me to try to reclaim it.”

He got in touch with the eBay seller. “He didn’t tell me who his buyer was, but he offered to contact that person on my behalf because he was sympathetic to the case,” Dunlop says. And the buyer “got in touch with me.”

He “was a professional musician,” Dunlop says, who lived in Texas. “He also had several of his guitars stolen over the years, so he was pretty sympathetic. He told me ‘Maybe if I sell it back to you, it’ll be good karma for me.’ “

He “offered to sell it back to me for what he paid for it, which was a lot more than my original purchase price. I did not complain because I wanted the guitar back.”

They made a deal, and the Texas musician shipped the guitar to Ann Arbor. It arrived on August 12, 2021, completing its forty-nine-year journey.

Even after the repairs in Madison, Dunlop says, the instrument was too damaged to play. He sent it to a luthier in Kentucky who returned it to its former glory.

When he got it back, “the first thing I did was sit down and play it,” says Dunlop. “I would say it sounds as good as it did when I heard it originally, maybe even better.”