I’m talking about the kind of guitar Burl Ives used to play. Robert Johnson. Leadbelly. Charlie Christian. Django Reinhardt. Woody Guthrie. Carl Sandburg, too, although I came to this realization only after losing an argument with my buddy Rick during a Trivial Pursuit game. After much protesting from yours truly, an encyclopedia proved him correct—Carl “City of the Big Shoulders” Sandburg indeed played the guitar! Who knew? Besides Brainiac Mr. Rick, that is. But I digress.

I’m also not talking about anything that's listed in the Sears catalog as a “keyboard.” That’s like referring to your car as “my dashboard” or a school room as “my chalkboard.”

Nobody calls a piano “Lucille” (like B.B. King’s guitar) or “Trigger” (like Willie Nelson’s) they’re just too doggone stately for that; if you had to name them at all, better “Frederick” or “Arthur.” Or maybe “Victoria” or “Margaret.” It’s the same with drums...can you imagine naming something—getting personal—with something you pound like a railroad spike?

You can’t sling a piano on your back or jump a freight train with one. Most pianos are so big they actually have a music holder installed right on the front, like a cup-holder on your SUV. You can stand on a piano, do cartwheels on it, stomp up and down like Elton John used to do before he got pudgy. And bald.

While a guitar collaborates in a tune, its strings massaged and shaped by the touch of warm fingertips, a piano is slightly aloof, distant, hiding secret treasures installed at the factory. One tunes a guitar by hand, as casually personal as trimming your kid’s hair, but one needs a specialist to fix a piano, like calling a surgeon to take out your spleen. A guitar resembles a woman; a piano resembles a coffin.

Andres Segovia called pianos “monsters,” and sometimes they feel that way, large and black and as expensive as a Ferrari, with thick dark legs and a huge mouth of eager teeth. Admit it. At least once in your life you’ve had the experience of a piano trying to munch your fingers with its jaw-like lid. No one gets bitten by a guitar. In fact, people grab guitars by their scruffy necks and ka-bong other people on the head like Quick Draw McGraw. How’s that for an OPCR (Obscure Pop Culture Reference)?

A guitar comes along for the ride. A piano has to draw you to it. The unyielding black and white keys are attached to a mechanical device that separates your fingers from the tactile sensation of the vibrating strings. Once, in the absence of an adequate monitoring system, I played "Jumpin' Jack Flash" on a busted up second-hand Baldwin so hard that my fingers bruised black. Another time, when my band’s equipment sat on stage for hours in the 102-degree Texas sun at an all-day festival, I scorched off my fingerprints touching the black keys. I once played a decrepit Everett spinnit while entertaining a smoke-filled hospital ward full of mental patients that had so many keys missing (the piano, not the mental patients) that the rest of the band couldn’t identify the intro to the song I was playing. But that’s another, much weirder story.

Guitars can be dangerous, though, or at least guitar cases. Have you seen El Mariachi? Rick once snapped a B string during a solo, and it got fouled around the other strings. Trouper that he is, in the heat of the moment Rick tried to grab the snapper and yank it off the bridge pegs, neatly slicing his hand open like a hot knife through Velveeta. The crowd dug it.

A piano is a banker at a dinner party, dressed in tails and brimming with exotic yarns of travel and intrigue. Sometimes it’s a battered upright in the corner of a neighborhood bar, like a weary regular who becomes a fixture. Sometimes a piano is a flirt; they used to cover their provocative legs with skirts to keep things under control. A guitar is a friend from your hometown with stories of how things used to be. Nobody uses a guitar as a piece of furniture. A guitar is a pet; a piano is a bull, and you are the matador. A piano stands up to punishment. A guitar gets smashed to splinters by rock ‘n’ rollers while the piano stands firm while the performer jumps on it like a gorilla. Jerry Lee Lewis had to set fire to one before it would die. Of course, Hendrix did that to his Strat, too, but he probably had ten more waiting in the wings. Pete Townsend built his reputation by serial killing helpless Gibson SG’s and Les Pauls.

I mean, what would you name a flute? A xylophone? How about a tuba? Why, Tubby the Tuba of course.