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Fifty-some years of building, fixing and selling instruments, from a basement in Oak Forest to the shops we run today.
Ree Teeter started building guitars at his parents’ house in 1971, when he was seventeen years old, and he kept going for more than fifty years. For a long stretch he worked out of the basement. In the 1970s he opened a store in Blue Island called Sounds Like This, then went back to the basement, this time in Oak Forest. Eventually RT Guitars got a proper storefront in the Mid Oak Plaza in Midlothian.
Ree passed away on March 19th, 2024. Near the end he said he was proud to have brought so much music into the world — through the guitars he built and through the store.
Jon Teeter grew up in his father’s shop and opened his own. Evolution Music has run stores in Chicago’s Logan Square, in Orland Park, in Downers Grove and in Des Plaines, and for a couple of years as far afield as Manassas, Virginia and Mastic, New York on Long Island. Today the shops are in Midlothian and Logan Square, with the Rock Academy teaching out of Downers Grove.
In 2025 it came time to move the Orland Park store. Jon felt compelled to look for a space near where it all started, and found one: Evolution Music in Midlothian sits two doors down from the old RT Guitars.
This is a collection of photographs of guitars Ree built or worked on over the years, and of the friends he made through music. We know some of the people in these pictures. We wish we knew more.
If you see yourself in one of these, click the photo and tell us. It takes a name, an email address and whatever you remember — a sentence is plenty. We will email you a link that lets you record the story out loud instead of typing it, add photographs of your own, and say roughly when it was, even if all you have is “sometime in the 80s.” If you recognise somebody we have not named, tell us that too.
The wall above runs on Story Grove, which Jon also built.
Story Grove is a place for a family to keep its stories in the voices of the people who lived them. Relatives answer a question a week — by writing, or by talking into their phone — and the answers gather into one archive with the photographs, so the stories are not scattered across inboxes and shoeboxes. An AI biographer weaves the separate accounts into a readable narrative while keeping each person’s own words intact, and when you are ready the whole thing prints as a hardcover book, with a QR code beside each story that plays the real recorded voice.
We are using it here for the shop’s history, which is not what it was designed for — it was built for families — but it turns out a guitar shop is a kind of family too.
If there is somebody in your family whose stories you would hate to lose, that is the whole idea. Have a look at Story Grove →