Eat your heart out, Liam Neeson, because Elaine Filion has a very particular set of skills. She’s a top-notch luthier—a craftsperson who can build and repair string instruments.  

Her quality techniques can bring discarded instruments back to life. And she has mastered how to intricately craft bespoke guitars, banjos, and ukuleles. Her clients include renowned cellist Jenny Lynn Young, members of the Austin Lounge Lizards, Brandi Carlile, Patty Griffin, and KD Lang.  

“I’ve done well,” she smiles. 

Elaine walks through her impressive South Austin studio. An unstringed guitar waits for her attention. She shares, “My biggest satisfaction of repair work is seeing the instrument during a performance. Knowing it was once sitting on my stand and now it’s making people happy.”  

Elaine’s career as a luthier was her third vocation. All three had a common thread: the innate motivation to fix, to heal, to build. To nurture. 

As if trying to recall a faint hint of a memory, Elaine becomes very quiet. She says softly, “there is something about feeling needed. Being a caregiver, a nurturer. It gave me power as a woman.”  

Her father was a fiddler, and while music was quite important to her, Elaine’s first calling was to nurture faith and become a nun.  

In a self-deprecating tone, Elaine declares: “I got kicked out of the nunnery!”  It took a while, but Elaine made peace with it. She moved on and helped people heal in a different way: she was a nurse for decades. At age 51, after losing her nursing job, she sold her prized banjos and bought the tools she needed to become a proper luthier.   

“Music is spiritual. It can touch the soul of a human. I wanted to be part of that,” she says. 

Now 81, sitting with her dog Daisy by her side, Elaine looks back at her life. 

“I had been ill-prepared for the world. But I did it all. I exceeded my own expectations.”