The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards once called a guitar handcrafted by...

The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards once called a guitar handcrafted by Joseph Jesselli, seen above in 2008, "so beautiful you almost don't want to touch it." Credit: Roy Somech

Guitar makers make guitars. Luthiers make guitar art. And one of the world’s finest luthiers was East Northport’s Joseph Jesselli.

“A guy on Long Island named Joseph Jesselli made two or three guitars for me last year,” Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones’ lead guitarist, told Musician magazine in 1986, adding, “[H]is stuff is incredible. It’s so beautiful you almost don’t want to touch it, though he’ll get pissed at me for saying that.”

“Best guitars ever made,” Alan Rogan, the longtime guitar technician for The Who, opined to The New York Times in 2005. “There are the guitars we all dreamed about growing up, and then there's Jesselli. And as cool as they look, they sound even better.”

Jesselli made but two to three guitars a year, each selling for as much as $30,000. From aging and hand-carving exotic wood to applying the finishing polish and even to constructing the leather and oak guitar cases to go with his instruments, Jesselli was a craftsman who took inspiration from Art Deco and Art Nouveau.

“With the time and money he puts into them,” Rogan marveled, “how does he make a penny?"

“The first day I met him, in 1984, he's working in the basement of his [then] house in Huntington,” recalled longtime friend Dave Rogers, of Northport. “And he's melting pennies and aluminum lawn furniture to make an alloy for a tailpiece,” the metal that anchors the strings to the body of the guitar. “He was a master but he was also a mad scientist,” Rogers added.

Jesselli died of cancer at the age of 75 at his home on Dec. 28. He was “an artist and a scientist,” agreed luthier Joe Bonomo, of JMB Guitars in Kings Park, who apprenticed under him weekly for two years in the early 2010s. “And then he told me, ‘You've learned a lot. Now you got to go out there and do your own thing, make your own name.’ He gave me wings at a time in my life when I needed wings, when I was trying to find myself.”

“He had a lot of admirers, a lot of people who appreciated his work and his personality,” said Justin Jesselli, the second of the luthier’s three children. Joseph’s shop Jesselli Guitars, which he opened in East Northport in 2005, “was almost like a social club at times. He had a regular rotation of people that would be there, often bringing work,” such as guitars needing repair, “and sometimes just to say hi to Joe and get their spirits lifted a bit — to see somebody who was enthusiastic and bouncing off the walls and just really accepting of anybody who walked through that door.”

Joseph Anthony Jesselli, born Aug. 21, 1949, in Manhattan, was the fourth of five children of grocery-warehouse worker Joseph Jesselli and Francesca Sica. The family moved to East Northport, where the younger Joseph graduated from John Glenn Jr.-Sr. High School in Elwood. He attended SUNY Stony Brook but left after two years and began apprenticeships with Huntington wood-carver Marcos Baiter, working on furniture and related items, and, for six or seven years, with master luthier James L. D'Aquisto, also of Huntington.

After a brief first marriage, Jesselli in 1974 married Kathy Huerter and began a family in Huntington. Sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, they relocated to the rural town of Hillsboro, West Virginia, where Jesselli would spend the next 18 years.

His wife’s father had moved there, explained Huerter, now Kathryn Smith, of Durbin, West Virginia, and after she visited and scouted the area the couple eventually found “a large home in disrepair on three acres with a cottage,” she said.

“He never made a lot of money,” said Justin Jesselli, “and the cost of living out there was so unbelievably cheap that he was able to have a whole separate little building for his shop. He hated being in West Virginia, but he did it because it afforded us a lot of freedom to spend time together as a family and it gave him freedom with his work. He lived pretty sparsely, but he never wanted for more. He always just wanted to be able to make art and see his friends and family.”

The couple divorced in 1996, and two years later Joseph Jesselli married Shelli Marie O'Rourke. That marriage also ended in divorce.

In addition to his son Justin, of Brooklyn, he is survived by his daughter Alisha Andrews, of Hillsborough, North Carolina, son Azlan Jesselli, of Dedham, Massachusetts, and sister Frances Sena and brother Robert Jesselli, both of East Northport.

Visitation was held Jan. 4 at Brueggemann Funeral Home in East Northport, followed by a private cremation.

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