“I wake up the next morning and my SUV is gone. We had just opened a show for Vince Gill, and he'd signed my Telecaster”: Rascal Flatts’ Joe Don Rooney had just finished a run of shows with Chely Wright – when his very first guitar got stolen

It seems like getting your gear stolen is a ritual for almost every touring musician – and Rascal Flatts guitarist Joe Don Rooney is no exception. In his case, the stolen gear in question was his first guitar, an “American Standard Seafoam Green Telecaster,” which his dad had bought for him – and which took on more meaning as the years passed.

“I just loved that thing and the neck,” reminisces Rooney in an interview with Vertex Effects. “I just practiced everything on that guitar, and that's a good thing about a Tele. You don't just have to play country music on it.”

Rooney recalls how he had moved to Nashville with his guitar and secured a tour with Chely Wright, alongside Jay DeMarcus, the bandleader of her band and later, his Rascal Flatts brother-in-arms. However, a golden opportunity would soon turn awry when the beloved guitar that he had carried with him all the way from Oklahoma was stolen.

“Jay, at that time, lived just outside of Nashville, over in West Meade,” he relays. “And so we got off the bus like really early in the morning, and he's like, ‘Man, you can just come over. Just come home and stay with me.’

“And so I drove over there and parked my little two-tone green Chevy Blazer that I'd driven from Oklahoma. And this is probably April of 1999. I go in there and pass out on his couch. I wake up the next morning and my SUV is gone. We had just opened a show for Vince Gill, and he'd signed my Telecaster.

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“Car was gone, golf clubs, the Telecaster... They left my suitcase with all these clothes in it, which is interesting. They found the vehicle – I think it was two weeks after that [at] some apartment complex in East Nashville. They'd taken everything.”

Safe to say, Rooney was beyond devastated. In fact, he still has the serial number in the hopes of one day reuniting with it. “It's got to be somewhere. I don't think anybody would have bashed it and, like, burned it. It had Vince Gill's signature.”

Fast forward to the 2020s, and despite its absence, that guitar continues to hold special meaning. “If that guitar showed up, I'd probably pass out, because I lost my dad, [on] November 19, 2022. It just means so much to me. He taught me so much of what I know before I moved to Nashville.”

Perhaps as a tribute to his stolen guitar, Rooney would end up using a similar model on one of Rascal Flatts’ most beloved tracks, 2005's Fast Cars and Freedom.

In a 2023 interview with Guitar World, the guitar player (and, at the time, GW columnist) spoke about his early days with the Seafoam Green American Standard Tele and elaborated on session great Dann Huff's influence on him and his playing.