Maybe there's something in the water in Athens, Georgia, that attracts great musicians. R.E.M., the B-52s, Widespread Panic, Ravenstone, the Indigo Girls, Love Tractor, and many more have taken root and flourished there. Now you can add Scott Baxendale to the list.

You probably haven't heard of Baxendale, but rest assured that professional musicians in Athens know he's in town, recently relocated from Denver. Baxendale, 57, is a master luthier who has made custom guitars for the likes of Wilco, Carl Perkins, and John Mellencamp.

He has traveled a rough road to this place, living through more than his share of turmoil and loss. What has saved him - at one point, literally - is the meticulous craft process he has honed into a livelihood over many years, to the delight of elite guitarists across the country. It's an art he now plans to teach to others. 

Baxendale says he strives "to make an instrument that's an individual piece of art itself that inspires the musician to create even more art." In that, guitarist Patterson Hood says, he has triumphed. "He's as good as it gets - as fine as anyone building guitars anywhere," says Hood, who plays for alternative country band Drive-By Truckers, another Athens offspring. "Some of the best musicians in the world" - Hood cites Booker T. Jones, for one - "marvel at how fine [Baxendale's guitars] are."

His painstaking attention to detail starts long before he picks up any tools. He builds "an individual instrument for the individual," he says, which requires him to analyze the most minute details of each musician's idiosyncratic handling of, and feeling for, his or her guitar. He wants to know: What was your first guitar? The first guitar you lusted after? What music do you play? What music do you admire?

When he built an instrument for Hood, Baxendale scrutinized videos of Hood playing. It was time well spent. "Like many self-taught players,"Hood says, "I didn't necessarily learn the proper ways of certain technical things." Baxendale built the guitar to accommodate Hood's quirks, his style, his habitual movements.

Ninety percent of Baxendale's custom work is building steel-string acoustic guitars. A guitar is like the human form - with body, neck, and head. The body is composed of two sides, the back, and the top, also known as the soundboard because its construction is a vital factor in determining the way a guitar sounds. A signature feature of a Baxendale guitar is the soundboard's bracing, which consists of 11 strips of crisscrossing spruce, glued in place, then scalloped with a razor-sharp chisel, all to create superior tone.

Most Baxendale guitars also have several intricate inlays. The guitar's neck is a laminate of two pieces of mahogany, with rosewood or maple in the middle. It's attached to the body with a dovetail joint, then the fingerboard is glued to the neck. Baxendale cuts and shapes the headstock, which holds the hardware to tune the strings. For this he uses several tools - including a rasp designed for shoeing horses - that make precisely the cuts he wants. Baxendale finishes his guitars by spraying on and sanding down coats of nitro­cellulose lacquer before polishing the surface to a mirror gloss.

It's this meticulous process and 38 years of experience that Baxendale now wants to share with others. That's why, above his storefront and workshop in Athens, a new space is taking shape: Athens Luthier Academy. Over the next few months, Baxendale will begin teaching as many as five students who want to learn guitar repair, restoration, or construction. 

He is passionate about teaching custom construction, because as CNC woodworking equipment has come down in price and thousands more people are making guitars, he thinks standards have fallen. "Too often it's all about getting the latest, greatest gizmo instead of learning methods," Baxendale says. Fine, precious woods are being used to make what he sees as inferior guitars.

"Scott is an excellent teacher," says DeWitt Burton, who maintains instruments for R.E.M. and works with Baxendale on occasion. "I think the academy will be a hit."

Baxendale almost didn't arrive at this hopeful place, despite a lifelong love of guitars and music. He made his first "guitars," cardboard props, in third grade in Kansas City, Missouri, when he and some pals started a band called the Shaggy Dogs. In college in 1974, under pressure from his parents to have a backup plan in case a career as a musician didn't pan out, he took a job with legendary guitar maker Stuart Mossman in Winfield, Kansas - having no clue that his new employer's clientele included Eric Clapton and John Denver. 

For the next dozen or so years, Baxendale was in a groove, working for Mossman and later for the premier vintage guitar shop Gruhn Guitars in Nashville. For the Hard Rock Cafe in Dallas, he repaired and restored some of the crown jewels of the music world, including the guitar that Buddy Holly used to record Not Fade Away, the instrument Elvis Presley played in the 1968 "Concert in the Round," and the guitar that Jimi Hendrix played at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. He also built custom guitars for some of the world's most visible musicians, buying out Stuart Mossman in 1985, after Mossman fell ill. 

By 1988, he was working around the clock, and his life began to unravel. Baxendale had experimented with drugs during college; now he started relying on cocaine to keep up with his intense work schedule. By 1990, he had a full-blown coke habit. As the drug took over, music fell away. What followed was a two-year horror-ride fueled by a cocaine addiction that devastated family and friends, cost him every cent he had in cash and property (he estimates about $500,000), and left him homeless. At one point, he and a fellow addict robbed some crack dealers at gunpoint. Charged with three counts of aggravated robbery, Baxendale spent seven months in jail in Denver, as his case slowly wound through the courts.

In the end, Baxendale's prowess as a luthier saved him from a 10-year prison sentence. The judge learned of his work with Mossman guitars and allowed him to serve two years at a drug rehab center and the other eight on probation, calling in each day and submitting to random drug tests. It was a break that Baxendale badly needed; a year into sobriety, there was more tragedy: His wife and 14-year-old daughter were killed in a railroad crossing accident. A year after that, his brother died of a drug overdose.

Still, he climbed his way back to stability. After completing rehab, now a single father with a teenage son, Baxendale settled in Denver and slowly recovered his livelihood. He started a new guitar business, Colfax Guitar Shop. Gradually, in the early 2000s, his clientele grew in volume and prestige. Life began to feel normal again. In 2010, Baxendale's son, John, started the Colorado Guitar Company, while Baxendale sold Colfax and headed to Athens, where, he'd discovered, there was a dearth of master luthiers but an abundance of serious musicians.

For this new shot in a new place, Baxendale credits his craft as a luthier. "I've always held on to that, through the addiction and all the hardships. I didn't play or make guitars during the worst of it, so when I started to clear my head, I realized I shouldn't just take my skills for granted. When I started over again in Colorado, I really appreciated what I had learned, and took it a lot more seriously." This new chapter is "about creating as much art as I can, and passing the knowledge along to students," he says.

In the beginning, Baxendale took up making guitars in order to play; in fact, he loves playing so much he's joined five bands since he arrived in Athens. But his best and highest expression as an artist is when he's shaping mahogany, spruce, rosewood, maple, and koa into custom, handmade acoustic guitars.

A newly strung, just-built guitar is "like a newborn colt," Baxendale says, "awkward at first, but as you tune it a couple of times and play a few chords on it, it opens up like a flower. It's very exciting. I live for that moment."

Philip Bishop writes and edits the advocacy website artistsspeakout.com, which focuses on artists and human rights.