John Billings, nicknamed the Grammy Man, crafts away in his remote Colorado town. He has made over 15,000 Grammys with 150-year-old tools for decades.
“I remember — as a child — looking at my hands,” said John Billings, also known as ‘The Grammy Man.’ “I have a handprint in clay from kindergarten, and that hand — it’s the same hand I have now. Everything else about me felt normal except these hands. I felt they weren’t mine, but they were given to me for a reason. These hands were a gift and have taken me through my life.”
It’s been more than seven decades since Billings was a kindergartener. In that time, he and his small team of four men have crafted over 15,000 Grammy awards. While the American Music Awards, the Academy of Country Music Awards, the Golden Globes, and the Emmys have all been outsourced to China, Billings continues to fulfill a promise to his childhood neighbor Bob Graves as he utilizes 150-year-old tools to make each award by hand.
When he was a child, Billings’ family moved into a house two doors down from Bob Graves. “I watched Bob make the first Grammy in his garage in 1958; I was 12 years old. His son was my best friend and now, his is my longest friendship,” said Billings. Young John, just a neighborhood kid at the time, was fascinated by the process of mold making, casting, and chiseling features into bronze figures.
Time passed, and, in early adulthood, Billings received a grant to go to dental school, where he learned to make crowns, bridges, and cast teeth. “I showed Bob the teeth I had made in school,” Billings recalls. Graves had health issues and was looking to pass on his trade. He invited Billings to be his apprentice, and for seven years they worked together in Graves’ old garage until he passed away in the mid-80s. On his deathbed, Graves entrusted the Grammy’s to Billings and asked him to promise to keep it as his own, crafting the award by hand instead of passing it off to the mass production companies.
Billings has done just that and, in the process, has been humbled by the beauty of being braided into the vibrant history of the musical arts. “This chasing hammer is my favorite tool. It is over 100-years old, and I only use it for light tapping. It rings like a bell and is very much like a drumstick or the bow of a violin,” Billings says. “The violin doesn’t make music by itself; it’s the medium between the tool and the art it creates.” In Billings’ hands — the rough and rugged hands of a skilled craftsman, afraid of neither fire nor chisel — that old chasing hammer becomes a tool to create a song all its own.
His craftsmanship has not gone unnoticed. Billings has repaired a trophy that was presented to Amelia Earhart in the 1930s and a Grammy that was presented to Taylor Swift (and accidentally broken) in 2010. Not long ago, Elon Musk asked Billings to create a mold of the Dragon Crew Capsule for SpaceX. The master craftsman was given an 3D-printed model of the capsule. Billings recognized his unique position as the link between the past and the future and quickly fell in love with the juxtaposition of the job. “I’m working on something that is going to revolutionize space travel. And yet, I’m doing it with methods and tools that are one hundred years old in order to reproduce this model that will become an antique someday,” he said.
Casting bronze molds, filing, grinding, and polishing have been much more than a job for Billings. He feels the magic of what he’s doing every day of the week. “I work in silence. I always feel there is something looking over my shoulder. I don’t go to church; but sometimes I feel I’m working in church," Billings says. “It’s this presence that surrounds and comforts me that keeps me honest.”
John Billings has spent decades working from his home studio in Ridgway, Colorado, a town with a population of 1,213 people and shot through with natural beauty. He’s not the first to appreciate what this place has to offer. Ridgway is a town with a rich western history, serving as the backdrop for old movies like John Wayne’s True Grit along with How the West Was Won and Tribute to a Bad Man. These days, it’s a haven of inspiration for craftsmen and artists who work with many different forms of media. John Billings serves as a solid source of inspiration for those young and vibrant new artists. He’s humble and soft spoken enough to brush off any esteem that comes his way, but somewhere underneath that leathery exterior, he’s not entirely shocked. John Billings’ childhood hunch whispered that he was gifted with something special. And every year when the Grammy’s roll around, he remembers that it’s true.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Candace Echols
