Here I'm appraising an all-original 19th Century C. F. Martin 0-28 with dark orange top and ivory friction pegs, about the only two options Martin listed on their price list at the time.The inspection mirror revealed a penciled date on the underside of the soundboard, a lucky find!

With the phenomenal rise in guitar values in recent years, many guitarists and collectors have been seeking appraisals of their instruments. Some guitarists, hearing about the high prices brought by vintage guitars at auction, want to find out about their own instrument’s worth, while others may simply want to add a guitar to their homeowner’s insurance policy, for which they need a written appraisal. While members of the first group are often disappointed, “Oh, is that all my guitar is worth?” some from the second group have the opposite reaction, more akin to “You’ve gotta be kidding!” when they find that a guitar they’ve taken for granted is now quite valuable. Regardless of their reaction, guitar players rarely understand all the factors an appraiser has to consider and how the resulting values are derived. Here are the steps I go through when inspecting and appraising guitars and other musical instruments such as mandolins, ukuleles, and banjos.

What Is It?

Most appraisals start by determining the instrument’s age and model designation. With guitars made in the past 75 years or so, that is often fairly easy, because they have serial numbers and model codes stamped inside or written on their labels. But many Gibson guitars made in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s were shipped without a serial number or model code, and 19th-century Martins had no markings, just the company name. Identification of Washburns and other early guitars can be even sketchier, so it can be helpful to have a library of reference books available. Many early guitars, mandolins, and banjos don’t even have a visible brand name, which means that appraisers will need to spend lots of time doing Internet research and searching through reference books and old trade catalogs looking for similar instruments. And guitars don’t have to be old to be valuable, as there is now more widespread recognition that some flattops and electrics made in Japan during the late ’60s and ’70s, for instance, have a particular sound and overall “vibe” that is uniquely connected to the music that was popular when they were marketed.

What Shape Is It In?

The next step is an assessment of the condition of the instrument. The three most important things I need to determine when appraising a guitar are its structural condition and playability, the originality of its components and finish, and what repairs have been performed in the past (and how well, by current standards, those repairs were done).

The structural condition of an instrument is critical because it determines what repairs, if any, are needed to put it in optimal playing condition. That includes the condition of the frets, straightness of the neck, neck angle, and string action. It’s also important to use an inspection mirror to check for loose braces and, on steel-string flattops, excessive wear to the bridge plate. On a guitar that’s had lots of use and many string changes, those innocuous little brass balls at the end of each string can wreak havoc with the thin piece of wood glued to the underside of the top just beneath the bridge.

This is also a good time to check for signs of earlier repairs. It can come as a surprise to many guitarists, especially if they’ve owned the instrument for many years, that a crack-free guitar that plays OK and sounds fine may still need expensive repairs to be considered in top condition. But string tension can take a heavy toll, especially on flattops, even when the guitar has been hibernating under a bed or in a closet for many years. Buyers are often far more critical of an instrument’s playing condition than someone who has owned the guitar for years and has learned, often unconsciously, to work around its shortcomings.

Is It All Original?

With every passing year, the originality of a guitar’s finish and parts becomes more critical to its value. On vintage guitars, the finish and parts may appear quite old but can be more recent than the instrument’s construction date. Determining what parts manufacturers used during different periods, and what their original finishes looked like, requires experience, as does detecting repairs. Until the past few decades, many owners sent their instruments back to the factory for routine repairs, even for something as mundane as lowering the string action. Manufacturers saw their repair departments as an important source of revenue, so customers were often encouraged to have their guitars made to look new again for a small additional charge. This usually meant overspraying the original finish with fresh lacquer, and although a factory overspray does not diminish an instrument’s value to the same extent as a full refinish (in which the original finish is stripped or sanded down to bare wood before a whole new finish is applied), it makes the instrument less desirable to most collectors.

Assigning a Value

Once all the above factors are taken into consideration, it’s time to assign a value to the instrument. While inventory listings from used- and vintage-guitar dealers may be helpful, they’re not always accurate. As anyone attending vintage-guitar shows may have noticed, the asking price and the actual selling price of an instrument are often quite different. Price guides, on the other hand, often lump guitar models from different years together, although such a grouping usually has numerous price ranges within it. The price guide published each year by Vintage Guitar magazine can be helpful, as can the Blue Book series of price guides (separate volumes for acoustic and electric guitars) and other similar publications. However, given the vast number of models, and the minor variations within similar models that can have a major impact on value, no price guide is infallible, and they are best used to corroborate values based on recent sales of similar instruments.

For the most part, assessing the value of recently made guitars is much easier, because you can look up the manufacturer’s current list price, find the typical “street price,” and then factor in the usual percentage difference between a new guitar with a factory warranty and an equivalent used model.

When assigning a value I try to rely on what similar instruments have actually sold for, and a database of sales figures can be of tremendous help. If our shop hasn’t sold a similar instrument recently, I rely on a network of vintage instrument dealers, many of whom have similar databases or very good memories. Another source of actual sales data is results from recent auctions. When using Internet auction sites, such as eBay, it’s important to rely only on searches for completed auctions, rather than current listings. Listings with high starting prices, or “Buy Now” figures, often run without attracting a single bid. On the other hand, last-second bidding in timed auctions means that the actual selling price of an instrument can double just as the auction closes, making any earlier bidding level meaningless.

Investment Considerations

For many people new to guitar collecting, the recent recession—I’m optimistically referring to it in the past tense—has debunked the oft-repeated myth that vintage guitars always go up in value. Instrument values have always been in flux; it’s just that the recent run of inflation lasted far longer than usual. Two big reasons for the recent price fluctuations are stricter standards among collectors regarding originality and a greater divide between the value of highly collectible guitars and those of interest primarily to players with an appetite for older instruments. When values are rising and demand is high, the prices of lesser examples of desirable models often go up simply because they are all that collectors can find. But when selling prices begin to fall, and it’s a buyers’ market, second-tier examples can suffer greater deflation because collectors still in the market are holding out for the best, and there are lower ceilings on the prices ordinary guitar pickers are willing to pay.

As prices escalate, buyers become more critical and similar instruments have a wider range of values, depending on the comparative rarity and desirability of certain years or versions of the same model. For acoustic flattops, the best example of this fragmentation is the original Martin herringbone dreadnought. Forty years ago, when demand for vintage D-28’s began to grow, there wasn’t much difference between the value of a 1935 D-28 and one made a decade later. Today, however, the earlier version can be worth two or three times as much as the later example, even though the differences appear minor to the average fan of old Martins. When differences in condition and originality are considered, the values of two similar instruments can be even further apart, or their positions can be reversed. For instance, a later herringbone D-28 in excellent condition might be worth much more than an earlier example that’s far more rare, but has been highly modified and heavily worn. This variation in one guitar model’s value often has little or nothing to do with an instrument’s playability, sound, or even appearance when compared to another. You don’t necessarily get a better-sounding prewar D-28 when you pay an extra $20,000, you just get one that people with more financial resources happen to want.

Instruments that are nearly identical to models identified with famous and influential musicians often have much higher values than similar examples of the same brand that are slightly different. Good examples of this phenomenon are 1923 Gibson F-5 mandolins identical to the one played by Bill Monroe and early ’60s Gretsch 6122 “Country Gentleman” electrics that match the one used by George Harrison. Contemporary artists, such as Eric Clapton, can also add a significant bonus to the value of instruments identical to the model they routinely use in performance.

Appraisal Numbers and What They Mean

If you are having an instrument evaluated, be sure you understand what the appraised value means. An appraisal of “replacement value,” for instance, is an estimate of the amount you would probably have to spend to find the same model, of about the same age, and in similar condition. Many people make the mistake of getting an appraisal for replacement value, and then expect to sell the instrument for that amount. But consignment fees, auction commissions, and other costs will probably put a considerable dent in what the owner nets from a sale, regardless of the appraised replacement value. As a general rule, most owners will not net more than 80 percent of the amount their instrument has been appraised for should they choose to sell it.

For most people, an appraisal is a way to get adequate insurance so they don’t have to worry about the possibility of taking a huge financial hit if their guitar is lost, stolen, or damaged beyond repair. For others, an appraisal is like checking the financial pages for the current value of their stock portfolio. Either way, it’s important to remember that any appraisal is a snapshot of your guitar’s current approximate worth in an ever-changing market.

In addition to the tremendous proliferation of guitar models offered in the past 20 years, there has been a dizzying increase in the number of wood species used by guitar manufacturers. Some of the more exotic names, such as Tasmanian blackwood and Carpathian spruce, were once the exclusive offerings of individual luthiers who essentially built custom guitars one at a time. But today, even large manufacturers like Martin and Taylor offer guitars made with woods that were completely unknown to the guitar community just a few years ago. The exotic hardwoods used to fashion the back and sides of a guitar are fairly easy to distinguish from one another—no one is going to mistake maple for rosewood, for example, or even bubinga for cocobolo. But when it comes to soundboard wood, the varieties are much more difficult to distinguish. Unless you are considering guitars made with mahogany or koa soundboards (see sidebar below “Mahogany and Koa Tops”), the trees that provide the wood for guitar tops are all conifers. Cedar and redwood tops can generally be distinguished from spruce, but there are at least four distinct species of spruce in wide use by guitar makers, and to a vast majority of guitar buyers, these spruces look very much alike. In compiling the information for this article, I talked with Dana Bourgeois, Bill Collings, George Lowden, Bob Taylor, Jeff Traugott, and other builders about their general impressions of top woods and the differences between them.

Both spruce tops and the lacquer often used to finish them get a lot darker with exposure to light, and this is especially true of Sitka. On the left, a new Collings Baby with Sitka top, on the right is a '50s Martin D-28, also with Sitka spruce soundboard.

Spruce Rules

Spruce (genus Picea) is one of the most widespread coniferous evergreens on the planet, and over 35 distinct species are known. From Christmas trees to the Wright Brothers’ first aircraft, spruce has seen a wide range of uses, but as the soundboard, the principle voice of musical instruments, the wood has reached its highest calling. It doesn’t matter if you prefer Van Cliburn or Fats Waller, all those famous piano recordings and performances are examples of spruce soundboards at work. Even when strings are set in motion with a deceptively simple-looking horsehair-strung bow, and the soundboard itself is a delicately carved arch, the wood is still the same: from long before the time of Stradivari, virtually all bowed instruments from string basses to violins have been made with spruce tops. The reason for spruce’s dominance over other woods is due to a simple, but extremely important, mechanical property that was evidently discovered centuries ago by instrument makers of diverse cultures: spruce has an extremely high strength-to-weight ratio, a property that both Stradivari and the Wright Brothers put to good use.

Unlike the violin family, however, the guitar’s size and shape, along with almost everything else about the instrument, varies dramatically. If you make a violin significantly larger and give it a longer string scale, it’s tuned a fifth lower and becomes a viola. But a 17-inch jumbo guitar and a parlor model barely over half that size are usually tuned to the same pitch. This is because the steel-string acoustic guitar, unlike the highly codified violin, is essentially a folk instrument, one barely 100 years old. Yet despite the incredible range of shapes and sizes, the woods preferred for making guitar soundboards are remarkably consistent. Although cedar, and, to a lesser extent, redwood, have been used for the soundboards of high-grade acoustic guitars for many years, spruce has been the overwhelming favorite, especially for instruments strung with steel strings. Although opinions vary regarding the fine points in any comparison of top woods, all guitar makers agree that different species of spruce that often look very much alike can have different tonal characteristics.

Spruce Woods

Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) has ruled the North American steel-string guitar market since shortly after the end of World War II. Sitka is the largest tree in the spruce family, and it grows along the Pacific Coast from Alaska to northern California. Sitka is known for its strength and toughness, ideal qualities for the soundboard of steel-string guitars that often must endure both rough handling and aggressive playing.

Adirondack spruce (Picea rubens), which is often called Appalachian or red spruce, comes from the Adirondack mountains and Appa­lachian region, on the opposite side of the continent from where Sitka spruce is found. It grows from eastern Quebec to Nova Scotia, and from the uppermost reaches of New England to North Carolina. This was the spruce species used by both Martin and Gibson during the prewar era, and it is probably the reputation of those guitars alone that prompted its return to the market in the early 1990s as “reissue mania” set in. Adirondack spruce trees are much smaller than Sitka, and the forests where they grow have been under more pressure from development and logging, while acid rain has also taken a toll.

Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii) is another spruce from western North America, but unlike Sitka it is rarely found at lower altitudes. Engelmann grows in British Columbia and southwest Alberta down into Washington and Oregon, and as far south as Arizona and New Mexico. The trees are much smaller in diameter than Sitka and grow more slowly since they are found at higher altitudes. Engel­mann spruce is generally softer than Sitka.

European spruce usually starts out looking almost white when freshly finished, but it can darken quickly. When new, the top of this 5 year old Patrick Eggle acoustic (on the right) was about the same color as the new Kremona classical guitar on the left.

European spruce (Picea abies or excelsa, an older term for the same species), commonly called German spruce, comes from a wide area in Europe ranging from Norway to Italy and east into the Carpathian Mountains around the Black Sea. Historically, much of this wood has come from wood dealers in Germany, so it has long been known as German spruce even though the actual trees the wood came from didn’t grow in Germany. When you read the names of the countries this spruce can come from, it seems hard to believe they are all the same species. What could a spruce guitar top from a tree in Norway, for instance, have in common with Italian spruce? However, when you look at a world map, it’s obvious that a similar distribution pattern exists in the wide growing range of North American spruces. Engelmann spruce might come from British Columbia or Arizona, but it’s still Engelmann. Adirondack spruce could be from a tree that grew in Nova Scotia, New Hampshire, or West Virginia.

Cedar top classical on the left, contrasting with an Engelmann top on a steel-string on the right.

Cedar and Redwood

Western red cedar (Thuja plicata) is another widespread conifer from the Pacific North­west, ranging from southern Alaska to northern California and as far east as western Montana. The trees rival Sitka spruce in size. Despite the name, it’s not a true cedar at all, but instead falls within the cypress family. It has been a favorite top wood for classical guitars for many decades, but in recent years has also been used for steel-string guitars. Northern Ireland’s George Lowden was one of the first builders to rely heavily on cedar tops in developing his signature sound in the 1970s, and this in turn helped popularize its use by other guitar manufacturers. “I decided by feel that I should leave it reasonably thick and not too light, and with hindsight that has turned out to be exactly right,” Lowden says. This observation points out one of the critical diffi­culties when comparing top woods, namely that their different levels of stiffness often require significantly different thicknesses in order to get optimum tone for a given guitar shape and/or gauge of strings. Although cedar can usually be recognized by its warm brown color, as opposed to the lighter and more yellow color of spruce, some cedar tops are such a light brown that they are almost indistinguishable from darker versions of Sitka spruce. Cedar is softer and more fragile than the spruces used for guitar building, so it needs more careful handling, both by the luthier and the player.

Redwood used in guitar making is usually Pacific coastal redwood (Sequoioideae), trees that can dwarf even the largest Sitka spruces. Redwood looks and sounds more like cedar than spruce, although it is generally stronger than cedar. One quality redwood shares with cedar, which limits their use in guitar making, is that both are more prone to cross-grain breaks when dropped or damaged by a sharp blow. Cracks in a soundboard that follow the grain are relatively easy to repair, but cracks across the grain are more unsightly and can weaken a top so dramatically that it cannot be repaired.

Identifying soundboard woods can be tricky, the unfinished top on the left (it's just lying loose on top of the guitar) is Sitka spruce, but it's hard to distinguish from the new Taylor 714's light-colored cedar top visible in the right side of this photo.

Woody Sounds

But what do these top woods sound like? When you pose this question to most guitar makers, their first response is, “Compared to what?” As Bob Taylor points out, you cannot talk about the sound of one wood species without comparing it to another. “Since over 90 percent of the steel-string acoustic guitars in North America have Sitka spruce tops,” Taylor says, “that’s our most logical frame of reference.” Other guitar makers I spoke with agreed, so for the rest of this discussion, Sitka spruce will be the baseline. And while other top woods get more press today, luthiers generally agree that Sitka is underrated simply because it has been so widely available and comparatively inexpensive. While it may not be the optimum soundboard material for certain styles of playing, it is highly versatile. Bill Collings, for instance, calls Sitka “the do-everything spruce.”

Engelmann spruce is often described as softer and warmer when compared to Sitka spruce. It’s lighter in both weight and color and responds well to a light touch. The trade-off, however, is that Engelmann is more easily overpowered by a strong player. Collings feels this wood is “best on smaller guitars with less (string) tension,” but it’s not unusual to find it used on larger guitars as well. Anyone who works in guitar repair would probably add that Engelmann isn’t nearly as tough as Sitka, so it’s more easily damaged.

Every builder I spoke with had nothing but praise for Adirondack spruce. Collings kept stressing its strength, especially with the grain (from one end of a guitar top to the other), while others stressed its higher elasticity, or as Taylor called it, Adirondack’s “springy” quality. Bourgeois referred to its “high velocity of sound,” which he says usually results in a guitar with a lot of “headroom,” meaning an expansive dynamic range. But Adirondack is more than just good at being loud; it has a wide tonal range as well. It’s therefore not surprising that though Adirondack’s most loyal fans are flatpickers, fingerstyle players like Laurence Juber (who has requested Adirondack spruce for the tops of all his Martin signature models) also give it high marks. The only downside to this spruce is its cost, the combined result of current high demand while much of its original growing range has fallen to urban expansion. Because there is less Adirondack spruce to choose from, the tops often show more variation in grain and color.

Of all the spruces, the widest range of opinions I gathered was for European (“German”) spruce. This is probably because of the wide geographical territory from which it is harvested (some wood brokers in Europe have been selling instrument-grade spruce for decades and are understandably protective when asked about their sources). Jeff Traugott says he uses German spruce “for clarity and brightness” as well as its “very even grain with less striping.” He points out that “it has a clean look that complements the overall design of my guitars,” admitting that aesthetics are part of his decision to use it on a vast majority of his instruments. While other guitar makers, Taylor among them, find the tone of European spruce to be very close to that of Engelmann, both Collings and Bourgeois find it has extra brightness in the overtones. In short, everyone agrees that European spruce sounds different from Sitka, but descriptions of what that difference sounds like are varied.

When it comes to western red cedar, however, guitar builders are generally in agreement, often saying that cedar has “less headroom” or that it “tops out more easily.” Cedar gets high marks for fingerstyle guitars, used by players with a lighter touch, because it responds quickly and delivers lots of overtones even at low volume. It’s harder to get opinions on redwood, primarily because not many builders use it, but the brittle, easy-to-crack nature of both cedar and redwood is almost always mentioned. Once you get beyond the more traditional guitar designs, however, top woods like cedar and redwood have a wider following. The extra sustain of redwood has been put to good use by McPherson and other builders with complex top-bracing patterns.

You'll often hear guitarmakers talk of 'grain run-out,' and these two photos of the same 1950s Martin soundboard show what it looks like. The only difference between these two photos is the angle of the camera lens in relation to the surface. Note that the half of the top that looks darker in the first photo switches to appear as the lighter half in the second photo. This is because the grain is running at a slightly different angle in the two pieces in relation to the surface, despite the fact that they are still a 'book-matched' set from the same board. While run-out makes the top seam obvious, and can be visually distracting, there's no indication that it has a negative impact on the sound of the guitar.

Construction and Design Matter

How a guitar sounds, of course, depends on a wide variety of factors, including the body size and shape, wood used for the back and sides, bridge type, internal bracing, and graduation of the soundboard itself. All the luthiers I interviewed agreed that the species of tonewood chosen for the top is one small factor in the overall sound of a guitar. As Taylor put it, “The whole guitar is like a recipe, and changing the top wood is merely changing the seasoning.” Guitarists familiar with different woods and their characteristics are prone to making sweeping generalizations about tone and volume, but they are often comparing instruments with a long list of other differences. Even when the body shape is essentially the same, the structural design of the sound chamber and how it is put together is rarely the same from one maker to another. A slight difference in the radius of the guitar’s top, for example, or the position of the X-brace in relation to the bridge, could easily have more impact on the instrument’s tone and volume than whether it has a western red cedar or Engelmann spruce soundboard.

Nowhere are these differences in design, from fundamental to subtle, more apparent than when comparing examples of the quintessential big American guitar, the dreadnought. It’s easy to find many examples from different makers, all made with Sitka spruce tops and East Indian rosewood back and sides. A Taylor 810, or its cousin the DN8, sound dramatically different from Martin’s D-28 and HD-28. Likewise, two dreadnoughts made of the same woods by Collings and the Santa Cruz Guitar Company will have distinctly different voices. The significant tonal differences are determined by the overall design of each instrument, not just the woods used to build them. Guitars are as different as the personalities of the people who design them, and in an increasingly depersonalized, high-tech world, that’s somehow comforting. As one guitar maker with over 30 years experience put it: “If you need a guitar that sounds different, don’t bother getting the same thing with another type of top on it, just get a different guitar.”

Sidebar:
MAHOGANY AND KOA TOPS

Although conifers like spruce and cedar have ruled the soundboard market seemingly forever, guitars are one of the rare stringed instruments where there is a tradition of hardwood tops as well. It all started with Hawaiian guitars (and ukuleles) about 100 years ago, where backs, sides, and tops of Hawaiian koa were common. Those guitars, of course, were played with a slide (much like a modern-day dobro), and for the long sustain of smooth but whiny tones, a dense hardwood top like koa made perfect sense. When Hawaiian music styles jumped to the mainland, guitar manufacturers in the states began making Hawaiian guitars out of mahogany as well. Soon those same mahogany- or koa-topped instruments were being fretted, instead of played with a slide, and they’ve been with us ever since. Because of the superior durability of mahogany soundboards, the edges didn’t need binding, or much finish, allowing all-mahogany guitars to be sold at lower prices. Big guitar factories in Chicago also made lots of inexpensive guitars out of birch, including all those adorable cowboy-stencil models.

Modern guitars with hardwood tops are no longer cheapos, but still have a darker, colder tone that Bob Taylor describes as “typically lo-fi, great for strumming and blues, but no church bell tones.”

This doesn’t mean that guitars with mahogany or koa tops don’t have dedicated fans, typically players who like the pronounced midrange response and strong fundamentals that a stiff, dense (and comparatively heavy) soundboard produces. Such soundboards are certainly a lot less fragile than spruce, which is probably why Martin advertised its first all-mahogany guitar model, in the early 1920s, as “handy for general knock-about use.”

I started playing guitar when I was pretty young and bought my first guitar when I was 10 or 11. Like a lot of people of my generation, I was inspired to do so because of the folk revival, initially the more commercial parts of it like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary. I later got interested in their influences, like Woody Guthrie and Doc Watson, and from there I got into early country music, bluegrass and country blues.

In the first half of the 20th century, Gibson mandolins dominated the market. This sunburst A4 model is from 1919.

When I was about 20, I got interested in buying, selling, and working on guitars. Around that time I met Frank Ford, and we started working together while I waited to see where I was going to fit in the draft lottery in 1969. Gryphon started that fall.

I was never really interested in collecting a lot of guitars. I bought a couple of early Martins when I was in college, one I still own. I’ve had a couple of different old Gibson mandolins and things like that. But partly because of the space they take up, I never really aspired to have a big collection. I’ve never owned more than three or four guitars at any one time.

Before the Gryphon partnership started, I was buying and selling guitars, primarily Martins, and Frank was working on them and building them. But once we linked up, we both did everything. As it’s become necessary to specialize, we’ve reverted to our old roles: Frank is in charge of the repair department and I’m more in charge of buying and selling vintage instruments as well as appraisals and writing. Franks also writes about how to repair them, offers shop tips, and also teaches repair techniques at a couple of different trade schools.

We were originally just interested in acoustic instruments—we didn’t do much with electric guitars until the mid-1990s—and almost exclusively American-made guitars, mandolins, banjos, and ukuleles. Of course, there wasn’t really much business in old or even used ukuleles until fairly recently. They’re the most recent instruments to enjoy a resurgence. For the first 25 or 30 years, although we would buy and sell ukuleles, they were a very small part of the business because they were worth so little.

Neither of us played electric guitar, so we were primarily interested in music that was acoustic-based rather than electric. Although I listened to the classic San Francisco-era bands like Jefferson Airplane, trying to recreate that sound never appealed to me. Frank and I were more involved in playing old-time string-band music. In the early days of Gryphon, we had the Mayfield String Band, which was active playing square dances and parties, and that was very much based on music of the 1920s and ’30s.

Collectors Weekly: Can you give us a brief history of the acoustic guitar?

Johnston: I didn’t do much writing on guitar history until the 1990s. But I was an English major in college, so I’d done a fair amount of writing in general. I helped out when “Acoustic Guitar” magazine was getting started. I took them around at one of the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) shows and introduced them to manufacturers so they could get an idea of the advertising support they could expect. I wrote a long article for the premiere issue and have done quite a bit of writing for them since.

From there, I contributed to books for Tony Bacon and Backbeat and then the first Martin book, which was published in 1996. The two-volume set was just completed last year. That’s the most recent book on Martin guitars.

The acoustic guitar as we know it today, which is primarily played on steel strings, is a relatively recent development. The guitar was fairly popular in this country in the early 1800s, and there were a number of different individuals and companies building guitars here in the 1830s. For example, C.F. Martin Sr. came to New York from Saxony in 1883. The guitar was quite a fad. There were a lot of touring musicians from other parts of the world who played New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and other major cities.

At home, women were the primary players of guitars, so a lot of the instruments from that era are quite small and feature a lot of decoration. Although there were a few concert guitarists, the guitar didn’t really gain widespread popularity until the mandolin craze of the late 1880s. The guitar hitched on as an accompaniment instrument in mandolin groups or for duos. Guitar and mandolin duets were popular around the turn of the 20th century. That’s also when mass production techniques arrived, especially with large companies in Chicago like Lyon & Healy.

Large-scale manufacturing and wide distribution of the guitar began at this time because that’s when catalogs first appeared. You see guitars and mandolins featured prominently in the early Sears & Roebuck catalogs, for example. Mail order also enabled people in rural areas to acquire instruments—they didn’t have to travel to a major city to find them. So that’s when it really began to pick up. The guitar was far more popular in this country in 1910 than it had been in 1880.

Collectors Weekly: Did popular music styles drive the creation of specific types of guitars?

Mahogany delivers a brighter tone than rosewood or spruce. This mahogany Martin 0-17 guitar is from 1937.

Johnston: From the beginning instrument makers sought ways to make their guitars louder. These guitars were strung with gut strings similar to violin strings, but longer. A small gut-string guitar isn’t very loud compared to the instruments it might accompany such as the mandolin—which was always strung with steel strings—the piano, the violin, horns, and woodwinds. It’s a highly portable instrument, extremely versatile, comparatively easy to learn to play, but it just wasn’t loud enough to hold its own, especially outdoors.

So there was an immediate push to make bigger guitars, string them with steel, and make them louder. The quest for volume dominates guitar development from the 1880s to around the 1930s, when they figured out how to make resonator devices—a mechanical diaphragm that vibrated in a metal body and amplified the sound—for what became Dobro and National brand guitars. Of course, magnetic pickups eventually came along, and the search for volume has primarily been in that direction ever since.

Since both the guitar and mandolin were so portable, it was very easy for two people to travel around and entertain in almost any situation. In fact, two Martin brothers performed on mandolin and guitar shortly after the turn of the 20th century, as did many others, sometimes with a vocalist. Around the same time, it was popular for people to write songs and record them. Of course it’s much easier to sing with accompaniment. And if you can accompany yourself on guitar, then the money doesn’t have to be split two ways.

Shortly after that, radio broadcasts of live music became extremely popular. Microphones had made it possible for the guitar to be amplified more effectively in balance with the human voice for broadcast. In the late 1920s, WLS-AM broadcast “National Barn Dance.” We think of those radio shows as being primarily associated with country music because that’s what they became. But at the time they were variety shows that would include popular sentimental songs, folk songs, light opera, and humor. It was basically whatever could be carried over onto the radio from Vaudeville.

Collectors Weekly: So when was the mandolin’s heyday?

Johnston: It would have been just before World War I. It began to fade in popularity in the early 1920s, although it was still popular throughout the decade. There were mandolin orchestras. If you’ve seen “The Music Man” with Robert Preston, which is about distributing horns and starting brass bands, the same formula was used to distribute mandolins. In fact Gibson—the most famous American mandolin company and the one that did more than any other to popularize the instrument—didn’t even sell through retail stores for the first two decades of its existence.

The instruments were all sold through what they called teacher agents. They would go to small towns and find a couple of people who already played the violin, because the mandolin is tuned like the violin but played with a flat pick instead of a bow. Then they would teach these people a couple of songs and demonstrate the mandolin in a concert.

The salesman would say, “Well, George Sanders has only been playing the Gibson mandolin for two weeks and listen to what he can do.” And so there would be these really impressive performances, and it got across the idea that you could play credible music much more quickly on a fretted instrument with a pick than when dealing with the difficulties of intonation and tone with a bowed instrument.

The tiple is like a large ukulele, but with 10 strings. This Martin T-18 is from 1925.

Of course this was before there was radio, and before many people listened to recordings at home, so it was appealing to be able to play music and do it socially and reasonably well without having to practice for years. I don’t think many people already in their 30s were willing to take up the violin or the piano because it was understood that the difficulty of those instruments required starting young. So working-class or middle-class people who’d had little music education when they were young were basically resigned to never playing music.

The mandolin was a way out of that. Although people worked 50 or 60 hours a week in those days, they still might have time to become good enough to play in a mandolin orchestra, maybe not as a soloist, but in the section. The music was primarily popular classical songs, things like Stephen Foster tunes.

Sometimes relatively small towns would have a 50- or 60-piece mandolin orchestra with guitars, mandolins, mandolas—the mandolin equivalent of the viola—and mandocellos, which were the fretted mandolin equivalent of a viola. Gibson even marketed mando-basses, which were almost the size of a regular string bass but were played with a pick and had frets. So that kind of distribution brought mandolins, guitars, and other instruments to small towns all across the country. One of the last functioning mandolin orchestras in the U.S. was the Garment Workers’ Union Orchestra in New York City—they were still active in the 1950s.

Towards the end of World War I, the Hawaiian music craze offered an even easier route to playing music. Magazines and catalogs were full of “Learn the ukulele in five minutes” type of courses. And a lot of guitar methods were for Hawaiian guitar, which is played on the lap in an open tuning with a slide for that glissando effect that you hear today from pedal steel players. Even more portable and way less expensive was the ukulele.

It’s hard for us now to imagine how influential these musical fads were because we’re surrounded by music. But in those days, we weren’t. Certainly both radio and records were already happening when the ukulele became popular in 1915, but not nearly to the extent that they are today.

For example, at the Pan-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, Hawaii had a large pavilion with a four- or five-piece Hawaiian group performing several times a day. People just went nuts for that sound. They loved thinking about sun-drenched beaches, girls in grass skirts, and coconuts on the ground. It was a great antidote to all that horrible, depressing news from the other side of the Atlantic during World War I. The Hawaiian pavilion by far drew more people than any other exhibit at the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition. Everyone wanted to see it.

There was also a wildly popular Broadway show called “Bird of Paradise” that played in major cities on the East Coast and in Canada, and it featured Hawaiian music. It’s almost impossible to imagine how popular this trend was: You’d see palm trees on napkins, pillowcases, cocktail glasses, everything. A shipment of ukuleles would arrive at a store sell out in an afternoon. A lot of the interest was centered in and around Los Angeles because that was the main place to board a cruise ship for Hawaii.

At one point, up to one-third of all recorded popular songs had a Hawaiian guitar on them. On most of the recordings by Jimmie Rodgers, who’s considered the father of country music, the lead guitar is a Hawaiian guitar. It was not played in the conventional way of country music today.

Collectors Weekly: What happened as that craze died out?

Johnston: It had already begun to fade before the Great Depression hit in late 1929. Swing became more popular, and people were dancing to big orchestras. In the mid-1920s, the guitar had been given a whole new life as American manufacturers began making guitars with an arched top and back—more violin-like rather than flat.

Guitars with F-shaped sound holes rather than round sound holes project more and have a much more percussive tone. They’re much louder than a flat-top guitar. And so that became the standard guitar for dance bands and orchestras because it was better able to compete with horns, pianos, and percussion. But its role was primarily to play rhythm. It wasn’t until Charlie Christian began playing amplified lead solos on a guitar with a magnetic pickup that the guitar began to be considered a solo instrument.

Collectors Weekly: How did the guitar rise to prominence?

Four-stringed tenor guitars were popular in the 1930s. This Gibson TG-25 is from 1966.

Johnston: Recordings certainly helped. Nick Lucas, who played both an archtop and a flat-top guitar, played with a flat pick on songs like “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and “Teasin’ the Frets.” He was the first to record what we would consider to be a hot flat-picking kind of solo guitar with singing. Recording made it possible for people to hear what the guitar was capable of without sitting right in front of the guitarist.

Riley Puckett, who was the guitar player for a popular string band called the Skillet Lickers, recorded solo records in which he would announce at the beginning of the songs, “I’m going to play a tune called ‘Fuzzy Rag.’ Now play close attention to these runs.” And of course he would play these long solos. He knew people were listening for that, and the recordings made it possible to hear every note. So singers realized that if they could play a guitar solo themselves that made the performance more interesting, they wouldn’t have to pay a guitar player.

When you look at photographs of those performers, you notice that they frequently wear their guitars extremely high on the chest compared to the way most guitar players do today. The reason is that most of them were performing and recording with only one microphone. By holding the guitar very high, basically so the upper edge of the guitar is almost in line with your bowtie, the guitar would be picked up by the same microphone you were singing into.

Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the best-known early guitar manufacturers?

Johnston: Martin and Gibson were the primary ones to make flat-top guitars, which are the ones that are most popular today. For archtop guitars, there were also other manufacturers, like Epiphone. But in terms of the flat-top guitar, with the exception of a couple of much smaller builders like the Larson Brothers out of the Chicago area, Martin and Gibson pretty much ruled the roost.

They were highly competitive and paid very close attention to what the other was doing. For instance, Gibson had always produced a lot of instruments with a dark-shaded finish on the face, so Martin began doing that in the 1930s. Martin was having a lot of success with a big, fancy guitar aimed at cowboy singers like Gene Autry, and that prompted Gibson to do the same. You see both of those brands in those early 15-minute short films that would either precede the main feature in a movie theater or would be played between reels.

Collectors Weekly: Did their quality distinguish them from the rest?

Johnston: Their quality and their volume. Those guitars were extremely loud. They worked well with the crude microphones and sound systems of that period. For a typical Western band such as the Sons of the Pioneers, those early flat-top Gibson or Martin guitars would frequently be the only instrument that was used. There might be a string bass, but sometimes it would just be one member playing chords on the guitar and then the three- or four-part vocal harmonies, and that was it.

That same formula was used by a number of singing groups in the swing genre and black harmony groups such as Three Cats and a Fiddle, which used the tiple, a large steel-string ukulele. They would perform with really tight three- and four-part harmonies with these ukulele bass instruments plus one guitar, which was frequently a tenor with just four strings. It was played like a tenor banjo.

Collectors Weekly: When did Martin start making guitars?

Johnston: C.F. Sr. came to New York in 1833, so there are Martin guitars that date from 1833, 1834. The company didn’t really begin to make a lot of instruments until it began to make steel-string guitars for the Hawaiian craze in the late teens. But certainly by the 1920s it was making a lot of steel-string guitars, and the production accelerated very rapidly from 1915 until the Depression slowed things down. The company went from less than a dozen employees in 1913 to more 70 employees in 1928.

As I said, the early guitars were strung with gut—they didn’t start making steel-string guitars in any quantity until well after the turn of the century. The more elaborately decorated guitars didn’t really begin to become popular until that time either. Martin’s decorations were always quite subtle. Usually it was just a narrow band of abalone inlay around the sound hole and around the edge of the top. The decorated instruments were initially intended for women, so they were only produced in the smaller sizes, but men immediately took to that kind of decoration as well.

Martin was asked to build larger examples of those guitars almost from the very beginning in the Civil War period. Those larger guitars were sought later by performers like Jimmie Rodgers and Gene Autry, both of whom played the fanciest Martin style, the style 45, because they glittered a lot from the stage.

That’s really the beginning of highly decorated instruments for performers. Jimmie Rodgers was one of the first to have his name inlaid in the fretboard of a guitar. The guitar became a portable press agent. You’re holding a business card, essentially, that says, ‘my name is Jimmie Rodgers’. A lot of performers after that, especially in what we now think of as country music, did the same thing.

Collectors Weekly: What are the characteristics of an American guitar?

Johnston: History is written by the survivors, and Martin was the company that stuck with it. So by the 1890s, most other guitars being made in this country were of a similar shape and style to Martins. And even when they were making gut-string guitars, the gut-string American guitar looked distinctly different from similar guitars made, say, in Spain. That was largely because Martins had evolved into a narrower waist and a smaller upper bout for a longer, slimmer body profile.

Lap guitars such as this Gibson BR-9 from about 1948 were some of the first electric guitars.

Likewise, when they began making instruments for Jimmie Rodgers or Gene Autry, and then even later for performers like Hank Williams and Elvis Presley, the popularity of those performers and the photos of them defined the style. For instance, the Martin Dreadnought, which is a bulbous-looking instrument with a very wide waist, was first produced as a Hawaiian guitar in the teens. But once it was adapted for use as a regular stage guitar and played by Hank Williams, Elvis, and Johnny Cash, it became the iconic American acoustic guitar, and remains so.

If you look at steel-string guitars made anywhere in the world, an overwhelming majority of them have directly evolved from those early 1930s Gibson and Martin examples. Many times the manufacturers don’t even know that’s where they came from. It’s just such a standard appearance that it’s like a bowtie or wing-tipped shoes—nobody buying them thinks, “Gee, where did that come from?” It’s just that’s what everybody wears and that’s what you have to have.

The guitars that are commonly referred to as having the hourglass shape are the earlier ones Martin made before it developed its own style. If you look at the guitars they were making in the 1830s, the upper and lower bouts were almost the same size, the waist is very narrow, and the upper part mirrors the lower section.

Sometimes the hourglass shape is used to describe later Martins that still have that narrow waist, even though the upper bouts in the later ones are much slimmer in comparison to the lower bout. But today, because of the popularity of the dreadnoughts, which have a very wide waist, sometimes the hourglass term is used to describe any guitar that has a narrower pinched waist as opposed to that very wide waist that results in a guitar shape that’s almost a trapezoid.

Collectors Weekly: What set Martins apart from Gibsons?

Johnston: The Martin Company has always been so conservative. Also the ownership of the company has remained more consistent, whereas Gibson, especially in recent times, has been owned by outside corporations that oftentimes had very little interest or knowledge about music, let alone guitars. So Gibson has had more ups and downs in terms of quality, consistency, styling, and things like that.

A certain percentage of Martin is publicly held, but I think the family still retains a majority stake in the company. So the Martin family has always had the last word as to what was being done. The guitars have evolved very slowly, and that means they have a more consistent sound and style. Today both companies are making reissues of the guitars they made in the 1930s, the ones that are really valuable to collectors. So the differences aren’t as apparent now as they were for many years.

Probably the most important innovation Martin made was the way the underside of the top is braced. They began using a pattern that has been widely described as an X pattern. The intersection of the X is between the sound hole and the bridge, and it enables the top to be quite stiff to counteract the tension of steel strings without being overly heavy so that it muffles the sound of the guitar. That was the style of bracing Martin began using 50 years before they began making steel-string guitars. But as it turns out, it’s a bracing pattern that’s far better for steel strings than it is for gut.

Today, virtually all steel-string guitars have some variation of X-bracing, whether they’re shaped like a Martin or like a Gibson. But Gibson began using that pattern in the late 1920s. Today it’s just accepted as the way you brace the steel-string flat-top guitar.

Collectors Weekly: Did Martin make mandolins and ukuleles?

Ukuleles are enjoying a revival, but they have long been a part of Martin’s product line. This mahogany Martin Style 3 ukulele is from 1945.

Johnston: They did. Martin’s success with the mandolin was not nearly as great as it was with the ukulele. Today Martin ukuleles are very highly regarded. The most valuable American-made ukuleles are the more decorated Martin models. Martin’s mandolins have never competed successfully with Gibson. So Gibson rules the design and the configuration of the American mandolin in much the same way it rules the electric guitar and the archtop guitar. But Martin’s ukuleles were far more successful. The ukulele was one of the few times when Martin came to a popular fad before anybody else.

When Martin started making ukuleles in 1907, they didn’t get it quite right and only made a very few. But they started making them again around 1915, and the instruments quickly caught on. It was the ukulele that really enabled Martin to grow. They had success with their guitars at the same time, but they made something like 14,000 ukuleles in 1927, which is what gave them the cash reserves to survive the Great Depression.

The Depression wiped out a tremendous number of American manufacturers, especially those that made the banjo because it had begun to lose popularity right at the same time. Companies like Paramount, Bacon & Day, and others that relied on banjos were either bought by larger companies or just disappeared altogether. Gibson was reduced to making toys for a couple of years to make ends meet. Martin was able to continue to be primarily an instrument manufacturer. They had some hard times and had to lay off a lot of people, but they came out of the Depression better than most manufacturers.

Collectors Weekly: Why didn’t Martin mandolins hold up?

Johnston: Gibson had a head start. It was actually called the Gibson Mandolin and Guitar Company around the turn of the century. Martin didn’t want to copy Gibson, and their mandolins were just not as loud. They were very well made—they’re still excellent instruments for playing in the home—but they just don’t have the volume and the percussive chop needed for modern mandolin playing. All the famous American mandolinists, especially Bill Monroe, used the Gibson F-5. That mandolin and the more simply shaped A-model have defined the American mandolin. Martin never quite got the formula right.

Collectors Weekly: When was Martin’s heyday?

Johnston: Most Martin fans would say the company’s heyday was from the late 1920s through the Second World War. But I don’t think the company would have seen the 1930s, when it began making the big steel-string guitars that made it famous, as a heyday because that was the height of the Depression. They were making great guitars that would go on to be worth tens of thousands of dollars and would appreciate more rapidly than most other collectibles. But they were struggling to survive at the time.

World War II interrupted production, and Frank Henry Martin, who’d led the company for many years, died in the late 1940s. His son C.F. Martin III was far more conservative. So Martin still made great-sounding guitars after the Second World War, but the ones that are considered the best and are being reproduced today are from the 1930s.

A small upper bout is typical of Martin guitars from the 1930s. This 12-fret, 00-18 is from 1931.

During World War II, there were restrictions on how much brass and steel you could use. Martin was fortunate in that it had no facility for doing anything with electronics, so it wasn’t forced to aid the war effort. Gibson had to devote a certain amount of its energy to wiring things for control panels for airplanes and things like that. Martin was only limited in the amount of brass and steel it could use. So it stopped making archtop guitars, which weren’t really selling very well anyway, as well as its mandolins, tiples, and things like that. They limited the number of guitars they made and didn’t put steel reinforcement in the neck. Other than that, the guitars were pretty much unchanged.

The large dreadnoughts are the most valuable, especially those made in the 1930s. Martin first started making what is now considered the modern dreadnought—meaning the ones with 14 frets clear of the body instead of only 12—in 1934, and so the most valuable Martin guitars are those made between 1934 and roughly 1939.

The reason they’re so sought after comes down to supply and demand. They weren’t making many of the large guitars. The Martin company itself didn’t think much of its largest guitar. They thought they were too bass heavy. As I’ve said, singers liked them because the sound systems of the day were very harsh and trebly. And so you needed the bassiest, smoothest sounding guitar you could find.

Today, of course, we like a lot more bass in the music we listen to than we used to. What do you hear when somebody comes driving down the street with their sound system turned up? Basically, bass is all you hear. So our affection for bass response over anything else is partly why those early guitars, which Martin called bass guitars, caught on. They didn’t really consider them for solo playing, but we use them for that today.

Collectors Weekly: Is the Martin guitar sound associated with particular musical genres?

Johnston: Yes. A Martin dreadnought or a copy thereof is basically the standard guitar for any bluegrass singer and flat picker. Whether it’s made by Martin isn’t really the point. There are other companies—Collings in Santa Cruz, Merrill, and others—that make guitars that look almost exactly like a D-28. Basically, that look is required for that style of music. Many performers who play early, Hank Williams-based country music use the guitar for the same reasons.

Other types of guitarists also prefer Martins, but the bluegrass crowd and many folk performers have stuck with them through thick and thin. Martin was the most popular brand during the folk revival of the late ’50s and ’60s. Joan Baez, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary, and Bob Shane of The Kingston Trio used Martin. Woody Guthrie primarily used Martin guitars.

Collectors Weekly: Do you have a favorite Martin guitar?

Johnston: Among the Dreadnoughts I like a brighter sounding guitar, so my favorites are the D-18s. They’re very simple. I like that understated elegance. Among their big guitars, that’s my favorite, but I actually like the smaller ones, too, because they’re so much easier to hold, and they have an elegant shape. But I don’t really have a favorite model.

My interest in Martin is partly the family history, its connection to American history, and things like that. It’s been a fascinating company to write about because the personalities have had so much to do with shaping the direction of the company. So you’re sort of writing about family psychology, American popular music, instrument building, and guitar popularity all at the same time.

Collectors Weekly: How has the wood used to make the guitars evolved?

By the 1940s, Martin D-18s (this one is a left-handed model) had acquired an almost boxy shape thanks to its very wide waist.

Johnston: Martin has always used rosewood for most of its guitars, and of course that’s a tropical hardwood—there’s no rosewood in North America. So they were importing wood for the back and sides of their guitars from the very beginning. That hasn’t really changed much.

They used Brazilian rosewood, which is from the Amazon, up until the late 1960s. At that point they switched to wood from India, East Indian rosewood. They still make a few guitars out of Brazilian rosewood, but the wood is endangered and is extremely expensive. So that’s a very small part of their production, whereas they used only Brazilian rosewood on all their rosewood guitars from the 1830s until the very end of the 1960s.

Martin initially used local spruce from the Adirondack Mountains, which is not far from their headquarters Nazareth, Pennsylvania, but that type of spruce was overharvested so there wasn’t that much available by the mid-1940s. That’s when they began using Sitka spruce from the northwest. They now primarily use that and spruces from Europe and other parts of the world.

They do use a limited amount of Adirondack spruce today, although it’s from much farther north than what they used before. Now most of it comes out of New Hampshire and even Canada. Martin also uses rosewood from Madagascar and other exotic hardwoods on special limited edition guitars.

Collectors Weekly: Does the type of wood change the sound of the guitar?

Johnston: Somewhat. I think most of us who work with guitars don’t feel that the wood has nearly as large an impact on the sound of the guitar as the advertising and the consumers would like to believe. But it does make a difference.

Martin has been making both rosewood and mahogany guitars for a long time. The bulk of their mahogany guitar production was in the 1920s and ’30s. And they sound significantly different than rosewood guitars. Rosewood tends to produce overtones that are somewhat offset or stacked in a way that produces a natural reverb effect, and that’s the sound a lot of people like, especially in the bass tones. They like a very rich palate of overtones.

Mahogany delivers a brighter, much more straightforward tone. It’s not as complex, and it’s easier to record. But for somebody sitting around the living room who probably wants something bassy—something that comes close to the sound you get when you’re playing in a tiled bathroom—a rosewood guitar will deliver that.

In recent years, even genuine mahogany has become scarce, so more guitar makers are using an African hardwood that closely resembles mahogany but isn’t really a true mahogany at all, for the backs and sides. What we’ve always called genuine mahogany, South American mahogany, is probably going to disappear from all but very expensive reissues of earlier historic guitars within the next 10 years. It’s been overharvested.

These days, Martin produces a number of models made from sustainable woods—either the species isn’t endangered or the wood is harvested in such a way that it can be designated “sustainable.” So they’re doing more with some native hardwoods like cherry. For a long time in the 1800s, cherry was widely used for banjos in this country. In recent years there has been a lot more attention paid to how the wood is harvested.

A lot of effort is being made to prevent the remaining Sitka spruce forests in Canada and Alaska from being overharvested because spruce is the best wood for guitar tops. But a lot of the spruce trees are being felled and used for construction purposes when other woods would function just as well. So there’s a growing consciousness of the fact that the woods like mahogany and spruce that we thought were going to last forever are going to run out if we don’t change the way they’re used.

Collectors Weekly: Is it true that guitars sound better the more they’ve been played?

Johnston: That’s purely anecdotal. Someone will say that this guitar they’ve had for 10 years sounds X-percent better than it did when they first got it. Its may be true, but how can you possibly determine that? I don’t want to say that guitars don’t improve with age. For one thing, only the exterior of the guitar body is finished. The interior is unfinished in almost all instances in finer guitars. So the wood in the guitar is certainly going through a seasoning process that continues for a long period of time. Although the wood is seasoned before the guitar is made, it’s still going to continue to absorb moisture, lose moisture, and age.

Decorative details were used sparingly on early Martins. This 00-45 from 1927 features abalone inlay around the guitar’s outside edge and sound hole.

Some of the tests that guitar makers have made indicate that when wood takes on moisture, loses moisture, and goes through a lot of climate changes, the variation in its reaction to those changes becomes narrower with time. So, in other words, a relatively freshly cut piece of wood will fluctuate more dramatically to changes in humidity than an older piece wood.

On the other hand, we don’t have any real data on all of this. All we have is what people perceive, and frequently they’re comparing things in radically different environments, including humidity and other factors. And that’s not even counting the differences in rooms. There’s a huge difference between playing a guitar in a room with wall-to-wall carpeting and heavy floor-length drapes compared to playing that same guitar in a room with a hardwood floor and bare windows. Personally, I don’t think it’s possible to make a really knowledgeable comparison between two instruments in two radically different environments.

That’s why I say that the scientific community would just laugh at all the anecdotal comparisons we have about guitars. But in the music industry, it’s widely accepted. A bunch of people all log on to a forum and say how much better a certain type of wood sounds than something else, and first thing you know, it becomes the gospel truth.

Collectors Weekly: Why does a musician need more than one guitar?

Johnston: Well, that’s easy. We’ve talked about the difference in sound of different kinds of woods, but there’re also different sounds from different sizes and body shapes of guitars. So different guitars have distinctly different tones, and some people are happy playing virtually everything on one guitar, while others feel the need to have several guitars to produce different sounds. That’s just a matter of choice and probably indicative of how many styles they play.

Some musicians can really cover a lot of territory, from acoustic pieces on a steel-string guitar that are classical or even Baroque in nature to music that’s heavily influenced by hip-hop and other modern styles. A lot of modern acoustic guitars are played in a very percussive style with a lot of slapping and tapping on the body and strings. So guitars that might work well for the more delicate, classically oriented pieces simply might not be strong enough to withstand the heavy rhythmic pounding that the player might use for another piece of music.

Collectors Weekly: Are guitar companies continuing to evolve as music changes?

Johnston: Well, yes. The biggest difference in the evolution has been that as the acoustic guitar began its revival in the late 1980s and early ’90s, guitars were expected to be much louder. A lot of guitars now have built-in pickups. So they’ve evolved in the sense that a lot of them look like a regular acoustic guitar, but have a fairly complex electronic arsenal inside that enables that guitar to be amplified almost to the same degree as a solid-body electric guitar. So it’s made the acoustic guitar a lot more versatile, as well as more complex.

Manufacturers are introducing a wider variety of models and types of woods partly because they want to offer more choices to their customers. Also, because of the introduction of CNC (computer numeric control), a company can store a lot more bracing patterns or neck shapes than in the past. What used to take up a wall in a warehouse can now be contained in an envelope. There’s still a tremendous amount of handwork involved in the guitar, but much of the machining is computer controlled.

Collectors Weekly: You mentioned an acoustic guitar revival in the late ’80s. Has that revival ebbed?

Bacon and Day was renowned for its Dixieland banjos (this Senorita Plectrum Resonator is from 1939), while Gibson banjos were preferred by bluegrass musicians.

Johnston: The guitar was tremendously popular both in the folk revival and in the folk-rock era that followed it, with groups like Crosby, Stills and Nash. But in the 1980s, synthesizer-based popular music was dominant, and frequently there would be no songs in the top 10 that involved much guitar at all. The guitar really went through a horrible downturn, and that had disastrous effects on all American guitar companies, including Martin.

In 1983 or so, Martin only sold about 5,000 guitars—they now sell 150 guitars or more per day. In the early ’80s, their production was below what it was during the early 1940s. So it gives you an idea of why the company almost went out of business. A lot of the revived interest in the acoustic guitar started when “MTV Unplugged” became popular, and performers like Eric Clapton began arranging their rock hits of the ’60s and ’70s to be played on acoustic guitar.

I don’t think many people before those unplugged performances of the early ’90s thought you could play “Layla” on acoustic guitar or that you could perform Beatles classics on an acoustic guitar. But then people began to realize that most of those songs were written on an acoustic guitar, so you can take them back to their beginnings and they’re often very credible songs with just a singer.

We were so used to the loud bands of the ’70s and early ’80s that I don’t think we were willing to listen to something played in a stripped-down, fairly elementary form like that. But now we’re a little more flexible. We’re willing to listen to the song itself, and frequently an acoustic guitar for accompaniment is all you need.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Richard, for talking with us today about acoustic guitars.

(All images in this article courtesy Richard Johnston of Gryphon Stringed Instruments)

Perry Bechtel

Almost everyone familiar with the history of C.F. Martin & Co. knows the story of how in 1929 a banjo player and guitarist named Perry Bechtel convinced the conservative firm to build a new guitar model with a longer, narrower neck. The new guitar had a 000-size body that was shortened so that the neck would have 14 frets clear of the body; a 25.4″ scale-length; a solid (not slotted) headstock; and a pickguard glued to the top. Dubbed the Orchestra Model, or OM, it was not only Martin’s first modern guitar; it was the prototype for the style that would define the American steel-string flattop guitar for decades to come.

The OM’s immediate popularity caused Martin to redesign most of their 12-fret guitars and give them 14-fret Orchestra Model makeovers. Within a few years of the OM’s introduction, models that had remained unchanged in appearance since before the Civil War had morphed into modern-day instruments. The traditional slotted headstock, wide 12-fret neck and long bodies of Martin’s original designs became old-fashioned seemingly overnight.

This 1927 000-28 is much like the one Perry Bechtel had on loan from his employer, the Cable Piano Co. in Atlanta, when he first contacted Martin about getting a special model with more frets clear of the body.

Soon, virtually all Martin guitars were redesigned with 14-fret necks, and the OM was no longer a distinct model. In the company’s catalogs, “Orchestra Model” became a generic term for flattops in the new 14-fret style, and the original OM was renamed the 000. The older style, 12 frets with slotted headstock, was still represented by a tiny handful of models and was designated in the catalog as the Standard series. (To this day, the S suffix in current models like the D-28S stands for Standard and not Slotted, as some people believe.)

In 1934, Martin introduced the 14-fret dreadnought, and the new guitar’s powerful bass response and impressive volume made it the most sought-after guitar in the catalog. The dreadnought’s enduring popularity helped erase the memory of the OM as the original 14-fret guitar. However, the OM was rediscovered in the late 1960s by players like Eric Schoenberg and John Miller, who felt the guitar’s balanced bass-to-treble response was better-suited to the complex fingerstyle technique they were pioneering than the booming bass-heavy sound of dreadnoughts. The rise in popularity of various fingerpicking styles since the 1960s has boosted the OM from an almost-forgotten model to its current place as the second-most-copied acoustic steel-string guitar design (first place still belongs to the dreadnought). C. F. Martin today sells thousands of OM models annually, and many other guitar companies, both foreign and domestic, use the same shape and OM moniker as well.

According to legend, before collaborating with Martin in the creation of the OM, Perry Bechtel played a Gibson L-5, which, when introduced in late 1922, was the world’s first carved-top, f-hole guitar. For decades, the speculation has been that Martin’s first modern flattop was heavily influenced by the first modern archtop guitar, tying the most dynamic period in American guitar design into a neat, easily explained bundle.

Perry Bechtel with his trusty Gibson Style O. Note that the odd body shape gave him access to the upper frets. This photo appears in Gibson’s 1928 catalog.

Under the microscope, however, it seems that history doesn’t offer such tidy conclusions. In 2006, John Woodland was combing through Martin’s files in the attic of the old North Street factory, researching another topic, when he discovered a months-long chain of original correspondence between Perry Bechtel and C. F. Martin III in a folder marked “Cable Piano Co.” These letters make it clear that Martin’s first 14-fret guitar was quite different than the standard OM models that soon followed it, and that Bechtel’s demands resulted in a unique instrument unlike any Martin guitar made before or since.

Furthermore, although a Gibson guitar was an important part of the equation, it wasn’t an L-5 after all. Woodland also discovered letters from other dealers around the same time that show that Bechtel wasn’t the only banjo player demanding new ideas from C.F. Martin & Co.–and also that the OM’s creation tale was tied to the introduction of Martin’s tenor guitars.

By 1929, the conservative C.F. Martin & Co. was ripe for change. Although the Pennsylvania firm had gradually changed its line from gut strings to steel strings during the 1920s, it had been slow to catch on to changes in how guitars were being played. Heeding requests from its leading retail accounts more than a decade earlier, Frank Henry Martin had been able to catch the Hawaiian music wave well before his competitors, and ukuleles and Hawaiian guitars had proved a boon for Martin. Selling as many ukes as they could build, Martin had expanded several times during the 1920s to keep up with demand.

Still, by the time the OM saga began at the end of the decade, the ukulele market had seriously slowed down. Martin had considerable success with Hawaiian guitars, selling to those who played it with a steel bar on the lap as well as the “Spanish-style” strummers who accompanied them. However, with the invention of the National Tricone resonator guitar in 1928, which offered greater volume and sustain than any conventional instrument, Martin was losing its share of that market also. To make matters worse, a powerful new competitor was in sight. Since its inception, Gibson had been denigrating conventional flattop guitars as “unworthy” and had been marketing expensive carved mandolins and guitars. But in 1926, the company from Kalamazoo, Michigan, reversed themselves and introduced their own flattop line.

Martin was aware that these combined changes meant the overall economic health of the company was once again in jeopardy. As Frank Henry Martin, then the head of the company, logged dealer requests into the orders ledger, he would make weekly notes in the margin as to the average wholesale dollar amount booked per day. Several months before the October 29 stock market crash of 1929, Martin’s cash flow was already in serious decline. The once-swelling ranks of employees in Martin’s recently expanded North Street factory were being trimmed, always a painful process in a small town like Nazareth, Pennsylvania.

A very young Perry Bechtel circa 1925 with a Paramount Style A tenor. This model was the plainest of Paramount’s professional grade banjos, but was still far superior to Martin’s short-lived tenor model.

In 1923, Martin did make a half-hearted effort to cash in on the banjo craze, but their Style 1 tenor banjo was poorly received, and after making only 96 of them, they ceased production in 1926. It was just as well: Popular music was about to undergo a major shift that would leave that instrument behind. Smoother sounds were all the rage, and orchestra banjoists came under pressure to “double” on guitar. As recording technology improved, the guitar became more practical as a studio instrument and began to appear on many popular records. Pioneering guitarists like Eddie Lang and Nick Lucas caught the public’s (and other musicians’) fancy, and as dance-band styles evolved, many leaders began to insist that their banjo players were able to provide guitar services as well. Banjoists needing a shortcut to guitar playing (and its completely different tuning and fingering) inspired the invention in the mid 1920s of tenor and plectrum guitars, which simply consisted of a banjo-style neck on a guitar body.

Martin responded in 1927 by introducing small guitars with narrow four-string necks. Trying to keep the instrument in proportion to the short 23″ scale, Martin’s first choice for a tenor-guitar body was their smallest, the Size 5, designed almost a century earlier as a short-scale terz guitar. These diminutive Size 5 tenors had a delicate, pretty sound but didn’t offer much volume and were practically useless in a dance-band context. Martin’s next attempt at a tenor guitar, using a larger Size 2 body, was added to the line in 1928. Tenor players soon complained about limited access to the upper frets, prompting Martin to build some rather awkward Size 2 tenors with 14 frets clear of the body, but as a result, the bridges were nearly in line with the guitar’s waist.

Esposito’s drawing sent in early March of 1929, suggesting how a long guitar body could be shortened, giving a tenor model 14 frets clear of the body instead of only 12. This same formula was followed again with the 000-28 a few months later to produce Martin’s first 6-string guitar with 14 frets clear.

In early March 1929, Al Esposito, instrument department manager of the major New York jobber and retailer Carl Fischer, sent Martin a crude drawing suggesting how a larger 12-fret guitar body could be altered to produce a model with 14 frets clear, despite the shorter tenor scale. Esposito, who described himself as “a player of plectrum instruments amongst the professional orchestras,” was writing on behalf of two well-known players–Frank Victor and Frank Petrucci–seeking a large, loud, high-quality tenor guitar. In case Martin needed another reason to design its first new guitar shape in decades, Esposito mentioned that he was trying to convince his clients not to buy a Gibson: “…I am holding them back from purchasing one of these, until I hear from you.” Carl Fischer’s 1929 catalog offered tenor guitars from Martin, National, Regal and the Harmony Roy Smeck Vita line, but no Gibsons. Like many salesmen before and since, Esposito was desperately trying not to lose a sale.

Martin first sent a standard long-neck Size 2 tenor, which was quickly rejected. The company then attempted to follow Esposito’s drawing, shortening a Size 0 body as he indicated. The “artist” was less than pleased with the result, complaining that the upper bout was “entirely out of proportion.” This historically important guitar–the first Martin with a shortened upper bout–has never been found. Martin may well have destroyed it after its eventual return, since Fischer complained repeatedly that it was “unsellable.”

Martin was finally able to satisfy Esposito’s customers with a newly designed 0-21 tenor guitar, with a shorter but wider upper bout. Esposito was pleased, ordering five at a time after specifying a lower price point, which Martin met by switching to a mahogany body. He was able to quickly sell several, including one for Rudy Valee’s Orchestra, and soon reported, “It is the talk amongst the professional tenor banjo players…and is going to be a big hit in New York.”

On the left is a Martin 5-21T from 1927, a model which sold very well in that year but was soon considered two small and underpowered for serious tenor players. On the right is a 1930 0-18T. With the exception of the bridge, it’s identical to the “Carl Fischer Model” completed just weeks before Perry Bechtel visited the Martin factory.

This “Carl Fischer Model,” as Martin called it for several months, was soon renamed the 0-18T. It went on to become Martin’s best-selling tenor guitar and remained in continuous production for more than 50 years. (It was made famous by, among others, Rabon Delmore of the Delmore Brothers and, later, Nick Reynolds of the Kingston Trio.) After early signs of success with this reshaped tenor model, C. F. Martin III was suddenly receptive to new ideas from banjo players, as well as requests for altering the body shape. Al Esposito’s glowing report arrived at Martin’s office while C. F. Martin III and his father Frank Henry were entertaining another hot young banjo player with big ideas, but this one was looking for a six-string guitar, not a tenor.

The instrumentalist who made this timely visit to the Martin factory was Perry Bechtel, who had been discovered a few weeks earlier by Martin’s new salesman on the road, James Markley. Markley’s job was not only to drum up enough orders to cover his commissions, but also to be Martin’s “ear to the ground” in the rapidly changing market. Markley met the 27-year-old Bechtel at Atlanta’s Cable Piano Co. while making a sales call. Cable was one of the largest and most prestigious music stores in the South. Having moved beyond pianos, Cable boasted a comprehensive string-instrument department. Bechtel was the firm’s main fretted-instrument salesman by day; during off hours, however, he was constantly playing on radio and in clubs and ballrooms throughout the Atlanta area.  Like Al Esposito, he was a professional orchestra player with lots of clout with his fellow musicians. Bechtel had recently returned to Atlanta after a high-profile stint with the Phil Spitalny Orchestra and was considered the local virtuoso of the frets. He was also a Pennsylvania native, and Markley discovered that Bechtel had plans to bring his Southern wife on a vacation to his home state.

Despite humble origins, Perry Bechtel had already flirted with stardom. A decade earlier, he’d lied about his age to join the Navy and, while at sea during the final days of WWI, had been introduced to the mandolin by the ship’s barber. Back in port, a fellow seaman shipping out had tossed Bechtel a pawn ticket, which as luck would have it yielded a tenor banjo. Unable to afford lessons, he contrived an arrangement that allowed him to listen under the window while a better-off friend received instruction. Soon after leaving the Navy, he was already a professional working in dance bands. Within a few years he’d made a name for himself as a hot instrumentalist on both tenor and plectrum banjo: “The Boy with a Thousand Fingers,” they called him, and later, “The Man with 10,000 Fingers.”

The article on Perry appeared in the Atlanta Journal just two months before he first visited the Martin factory.

Hokey sobriquets aside, Perry Bechtel was recognized by any who heard him as having extraordinary musical sense as well as staggering technique. Unlike many banjoists, Bechtel had little interest in tenor or plectrum guitars, being already equally adept at playing both four-string banjo and six-string guitar. Once he was employed by Cable Piano, Bechtel’s public appearances became de facto advertisements for the store’s fretted-instrument department, with one glaring problem: Perry Bechtel was playing shows with a Gibson, and Cable was not a Gibson dealer.

After receiving the tip from Markley, C.F. III invited Bechtel to drop by the factory when he was in the area. “As we understand it,” C.F. wrote in a letter, sent care of Cable, “you are planning to motor, leaving Atlanta June 15th.” Directions from Philadelphia were given, “the best route… lies through Doylestown and Easton… and the road is very good.”  Bechtel was asked if he would remain in Nazareth at least through June 22, when Markley would return from a sales trip. Although they likely spent time at the factory discussing Bechtel’s guitar needs, there was time for fun as well. Bechtel, Frank Henry Martin and C. F. III went fishing at a nearby lake and enjoyed a picnic together with their wives.

The bond between C.F. III and Bechtel was no doubt aided by the fact that they were both Pennsylvania boys who had married ladies from Atlanta. Bechtel took photos of the Martins with his new camera, and Markley also took some photos before Bechtel and his wife left town. For the next few weeks, correspondence between the Martin Guitar Company and Cable Piano was as much about photography as about guitars. On July 10, Bechtel wrote to C.F. expressing his and Mrs. Bechtel’s “appreciation of your genial and general hospitality…. That picnic will linger long in one ‘potato chef’s’ memory. Enclosed are the pictures of yourself and Mr. Martin Sr. which, as you will probably remember, were snapped against odds of a dark afternoon, but came out fine I thought.” The letters, along with a carbon copy of C.F.’s replies, were kept in Martin’s files, but the photos were sadly not among them.

The Martins were not only genuinely interested in Bechtel’s ideas, they were anxious to please both him and Cable Piano. C.F. III had delivered a custom 12-fret 000-45 to “Blue Yodeler” Jimmie Rodgers the year before, but the influence that genial strummer would have on other musicians was not yet known. Before that, Martin had well-known guitarists and teachers like William Foden and Vahdah Olcott Bickford endorsing its instruments, but they were hardly media stars. By 1928, Gibson had debuted a special deluxe-model flattop endorsed by Nick Lucas, whose recordings were showcases for flashy “plectrum” (flatpick) guitar playing. Bechtel’s flatpicking was equally flashy but even more sophisticated. The fact that Bechtel had been playing a Gibson made the challenge of winning him to the Martin side all the more enticing.

The new guitar that Perry Bechtel and the Martins agreed upon would be based on the “big Martin,” a 000-28 loaned to Bechtel by his employer. The 000 was the largest size Martin had in production under their name–the dreadnought shape was still an exclusive item for Ditson. By shortening the long upper bout of the 000 and moving both the bridge and the soundhole up closer to the neck block, the team had drawn up a pleasing guitar shape, one that allowed for a neck with 14 frets clear of the body. Factory foreman John Deichman was almost certainly the primary draftsman of both this and the similar tenor shape redrawn a few months earlier.

One of Bechtel’s priorities was a pickguard to avoid scratching the top with his pick. (He’d already damaged the finish on the guitar borrowed from Cable.) Bechtel also wasn’t happy with the neck on the borrowed Martin and wanted his custom guitar to have a neck as close to that of his Gibson as possible, along with extra fingerboard and headstock binding. Since he didn’t have the Gibson with him on the trip, he agreed to make careful measurements of the neck width and fretboard radius when he returned to Atlanta. As soon as the Bechtels left Nazareth, C. F. III wrote to William Schrader, Bechtel’s manager at the Cable Piano Co., to confirm the order, as it was clear that Cable was footing the bill.

It’s clear from Schrader’s reply to Martin that Bechtel’s Gibson was not an L-5, but a Style 0 “Artist’s Model,” probably the 1922 or 1923 example he is pictured holding in the 1928 Gibson catalog. This guitar qualifies as “freak shaped” even by modern standards! Although the Style 0 was an obsolete model (it disappeared from Gibson’s price lists by 1924), the odd cutaway upper bout did allow its player easy access to the 15th fret on the treble side, a distinct advantage for a plectrum banjo player used to full access to 22 frets.  Schrader seemed somewhat dismissive of Bechtel’s special demands; no doubt he had plenty of experience dealing with the quirks of his “prima donna” salesman, but he was still determined to have Cable’s “golden boy” play a Martin in public.

This is the shop order, found in Martin’s archives, for the ‘000-28 Special’ that was shipped to Cable Piano Co. just a few weeks later.

Martin wasted no time in getting the project started, and by July 15, C.F. reported to Bechtel: “Your guitar has made good progress and is now awaiting the template for the neck and fingerboard. We need to know the exact width of the fingerboard at the nut and at the twelfth fret, also the exact shape you desire on the surface of the fingerboard at these two points.” Bechtel replied on July 20, saying he would gladly send his Gibson to Martin so the neck could be duplicated–if not for the fact that he was forced to use it: “The big Martin is en route to you for bridge gluing and refinishing.” He also hinted for the first time that the extra binding he’d requested wouldn’t be the only decoration added to Martin’s rather plain Style 28: “Am more than anxious to try this new Martin and if it works out I’m going to have you dress up the peg head a bit.”

Ten days after work was begun on Perry’s special 000, he finally took measurements of the neck of his Style O Gibson and sent templates of both the width and the radius of the fretboard to Martin.

A few days later, he sent Martin the needed templates, apologizing for his rather crude draftsmanship. C. F. III replied, “There is no need to apologize…. [U]sing them as guides we are going right ahead with your Guitar and will undertake to promise delivery about August first.” He was also pleasantly surprised to learn both the width and fingerboard radius of Bechtel’s Gibson neck: “The width you specify is less by 1/16” at the nut…than our standard fingerboard, which, undoubtedly, is an important factor to you in handling the instrument. The rounding is somewhat greater but not as much as we expected.” As this letter was dated July 22, it’s clear that Martin was capable of rushing important orders through the factory very quickly.

On August 9, Bechtel wrote again, with good news: “The guitar arrived–a beautiful job–surpassed my expectation in appearance and grace of lines.” But he complained the action was too low, “so that the E string hasn’t the maximum of tone.” He remarked that he would not trust the local “violin luthiers” (possibly Cable’s own repair department) with guitar adjustments. This letter also contains the first complaints about the depth of the neck. Perhaps he should have sent Martin the Style 0 after all, as the deep “V” profile on those Gibson necks is unlike any Martin from the 1920s. At this point, however, Bechtel still saw great potential in the project, so he made suggestions for decorating the headstock while the guitar was back at the factory to have the action adjusted.

While back at the factory for action adjustment, Perry followed up on his earlier suggestions about having Martin “dress up the peg head.” Note that his drawing shows the slotted head stock. The delay in getting a custom inlay design prompted him to settle for a Style 45 headplate with “torch” inlay Martin already had in stock.

C.F. III’s reply encouraged Bechtel to return the guitar for action adjustment, “and while it is here we will supply the special head veneer inlaid as you suggest. This will take a little extra time because we would send a Rosewood head veneer to the firm in New York City that does our special inlay work, but it will probably be possible to return the Guitar within two weeks time.” Bechtel’s need to have the guitar returned as quickly as possible put an end to any further discussion of a custom inlay on the headstock. Instead, Martin agreed to add a stock Style 45 headplate with what is now called the “torch” inlay. Bechtel signed his letter, full of complaints about the neck depth, with “Yours for the last word in ‘fine guitars for finicky folks’ like yours truly, Perry.” The man had a knack for understatement.

As promised, Martin turned Bechtel’s guitar around in barely a week’s time, and that included adding the Style 45 headstock veneer and touching up the finish. Although fulfilling a young hotshot’s many demands had been time-consuming, the resulting guitar was already reaping unexpected dividends. “By good fortune,” wrote Martin, “we were able to have your Guitar tried out by Mr. Roy Smeck who paid us an unexpected visit. He liked the Guitar very much and seemed to think you were farsighted in having it made up.  He expressed a desire to have a similar Guitar for his own use at a later date.”

On September 13, Perry replied, finally seeming content with his new instrument: “The guitar is now fine, am using it plenty on the air nowadays, and have had several compliments on it. Am glad Roy tried out this model, and am reasonably sure, if you will introduce it to the star plectrum guitarists, that it will meet with approval. My only suggestion–make the neck a little deeper.”

Despite the trials of building its second custom guitar shape in less than six months, Martin seemed encouraged by the potential of this new model. On October 5, a prototype “000-28 Special” was begun, with additional notation calling it the “Perry Bechtel Model.” Since there were no dealer requests for the new model yet, this was probably the guitar James Markley took with him on the road to drum up orders. On October 12, the Cincinnati branch of the Wurlitzer music-store chain put in the first order, prompting another “Perry Bechtel Model” 000-28 to be started three days later. This guitar, serial number 39904, has survived; it has a slotted headstock like Perry’s original, but without the extra binding and inlay on the neck (it also has John Deichman’s initials on the underside of the top). Martin had been hearing more complaints from banjo players about wide necks, and so even at this early date, the neck was reduced to just 1 ¾” wide at the nut, a feature repeated on all later 14-fret six-string models. Compared to Bechtel’s custom Martin, these later 000-28 Specials also lacked the heavily arched fretboard radius derived from the Gibson Style 0.

By late November, eight more 000-28 Specials were started (a batch of three, a left-handed version and another batch of four), and Bechtel’s name appeared next to the model designation on most of them, sometimes with “Professional Model” added. (These notations are only in Martin’s records, not on the instruments themselves, as Martin was still two years away from stamping model designations inside its instruments.) As far as we can tell from surviving examples, these guitars were all given the solid headstock, with banjo tuners, as seen on the OM-28 that appeared in Martin’s 1930 catalog a few months later.

From other letters to Martin from its dealers around this time, it’s clear the company was already feeling pressure from the growing popularity of archtop guitars. Barely a decade after Martin had first embraced the use of steel strings, guitar players began defecting from traditional flattops to the archtop style. Minneapolis dealer B.A. Rose wrote to Martin in early November of 1929, summarizing the dilemma: “We are getting inquiries now for regular guitar for orchestra playing. We find that your regular six-string instrument is not proving entirely satisfactory. We believe that it will be necessary for you to build, just as you do the tenor-guitar, a special guitar for pick playing….” Rose was careful to enumerate the changes needed, including having strings “just as close together as they are on the banjo,” geared pegs (as on Martin tenor guitars), better access to the upper frets and a pickguard. Other suggestions included a “tilted neck,” an adjustable bridge and a tailpiece, as found on archtop guitars.

C. F. III wasted no time in replying: Martin had already realized “that there is a demand from Banjo players for a Guitar which they can handle easily and which will be responsive and full in tone.” He went on to describe the newly modified 000-28 made first “for Mr. Perry Bechtel, a well known professional player, who pronounced it the best Guitar he ever used…. Since several of this new model are now coming through the factory we wish you would permit us to send you one….” On November 20, Rose was sent one of the new “Professional Models” for a 10-day trial, but he returned it, saying they didn’t feel it was different enough from the standard 000-28. He repeated their request for a Martin guitar made like an archtop.

Even the man who had set Martin on this track of building a long-necked flattop guitar for orchestra wasn’t happy with his new instrument for very long. By December 5, Bechtel wrote to Martin again, this time complaining of the action being too high, and also of a “lack of musical tone” when the G string was fretted. “All this may be due to the extra thinness of the neck (in depth)…,” he stated. C. F. III offered to work on Bechtel’s guitar once again, but it’s clear that his patience was wearing thin. “The neck of this instrument is every bit as thick as our regular Guitar necks and should give you no trouble,” Martin replied.

James Markley, ever the diligent salesman, continued to pitch the new model when calling on Martin dealers, but beginning in December it was called a “000-28 Orchestra Model,” later shortened to “000-28 OM”–but with no mention of Perry Bechtel. Bechtel went on to an illustrious career as a bandleader and musician, and the instrument he had first requested and helped design inspired a revolution in Martin’s entire line of steel-string guitars. Yet, they did not travel those roads to fame together.

Photos from the 1930s and '40s show Perry with a number of different Gibson archtops, including L-5 and Super 400 models. Later photos show him with a D’Angelico.

Period photos in Perry Bechtel’s personal scrapbook clearly show that, like nearly all 1930s band and orchestra guitarists, he used modern f-hole archtop guitars. It’s also apparent that Perry was never content with any one guitar for very long. He is pictured with several different Gibson L-5s, which are all the Advanced 17-inch models that were first introduced in late 1934, an early Gibson Super 400 and a D’Angelico Excel, among others. In 1935, when the Martin Company introduced the F-9, a model with an arched top and flat back, C. F. III tempted fate by sending one to Bechtel for a free trial. Bechtel politely returned it with a note that it lacked “velvet” in the tone. By then he was accustomed to more sophisticated, fully carved archtops like the L-5, which quickly relegated Martin’s F-9 to obscurity.

Martin’s OM model had a far happier fate, despite failing to win over the orchestra players it was designed to please. Once the new model was shipped to dealers on the west coast, orders began to stream in. Martin added a mahogany OM-18 to its line, which quickly began to outsell the more expensive OM-28. Most high-profile players who bought OM models didn’t wear tuxedos, however, but instead were more likely to perform wearing colorful Western outfits.

“Hillbilly” music, particularly on the radio, was big business by the early 1930s. Jimmy Rodgers had proved to be one of the most influential artists of the era after all. Roy Rogers, who was still using his real name, Leonard Slye, played an OM in the Sons of the Pioneers, as did Hugh Farr, the group’s hot-picking guitarist. Haywire Mac McClintock (who wrote “Big Rock Candy Mountain”) and his Haywire Orchestra had two OMs in the group. Despite their humble rail-fence and hay-bale backdrops, many of these west coast cowboy bands were financially very successful, and even a pearl-trimmed OM-45 was not out of reach. Roy Rogers, of course, bought an OM-45 Deluxe, the most ornate and expensive flattop Martin ever cataloged during the 1930s.

The OM was also popular with a wide range of ordinary pickers who enjoyed the longer, slimmer neck. Once the new OM models were pictured in the 1930 Martin catalog, dealers across the country were soon ordering them, almost to the exclusion of the old Standard Model (12-fret) Martins. Some dealers even wrote to Martin asking if they could exchange unsold 12-fret models for the new, hot-selling OMs their customers now demanded. The result, as mentioned earlier, was that virtually all Martin models were quickly given OM-like features. The ironic footnote to the story is that, by the 1970s, the early OM was widely considered the greatest fingerstyle guitar of all–when, of course, they had been specifically designed for “plectrum” playing.

Despite his constant search for the perfect guitar, Perry Bechtel never made a lasting impression with that instrument. His plectrum banjo work, however, is legendary. Although he was never a household name like his old pal, Eddie Peabody, Bechtel’s fame warranted a full-page photo in Life magazine in 1955, where he was credited with renewing America’s interest in the four-string banjo.

Perry was given a full page in Life magazine in 1955, recognizing his efforts to breathe new life into the nearly forgotten 4-string banjo. Three years later, the RCA LP recorded by Chet Atkins assured Perry’s place as one of the greatest plectrum banjo artists of all time.

In 1958, RCA’s Chet Atkins called Bechtel, saying “I can’t find anyone who plays as much banjo as you do,” and asking him to record an LP with a trio of guitar, bass and drums. The results, an album called The Greatest of Them All, was a best-seller that is still considered by many experts to be a highpoint of the four-string banjo style, with sophisticated arrangements rich in chord melody and moving harmony. Playing a Bacon & Day plectrum banjo equipped with a knee mute–and with some additional aid from Atkins’ engineering skills–Bechtel avoids the usual clanging banjo tones entirely. Around this time, Bechtel ceased playing much guitar, but he remained one of the best-known, and most gracious, ambassadors of the plectrum banjo for the rest of his life. Even today, banjo players consider it an achievement to master one of his arrangements.

Like many musical geniuses, Perry Bechtel was rarely satisfied when it came to tone and was constantly modifying his instruments in vain attempts to get the sound he wanted.  His family remembers him as constantly tinkering, trying out new ideas, unfailingly modest but never content to rest on his laurels. Even as late as 1980, Bechtel was still talking about his quest for the tones he heard in his head but could never find in an actual instrument. “But when I hear the sound that I want,” he said in an interview, “I’d go from here to California to get that sound, if I heard the one I wanted…. I’m still looking for that sound…that purple sound…velvet sound. I could go on and on about that. I hear it in my sleep.” Perry Bechtel died on February 21, 1982, and, hopefully, he found an abundance of the purple, velvet sound he’d long been seeking.

SIDEBAR

What Happened to the first 14-fret Martin guitar?

We don’t know what happened to Perry’s original 000-28 Special. With a bound neck on a Style 28 body, and a slotted headstock with Style 45 “torch” inlay, it would be quickly recognized as a something out of the ordinary, but there’s no indication it has ever surfaced.

Here’s what we do know: The guitar was at least initially owned by Cable Piano Co., and not by Perry himself. He had been borrowing a 000-28 from Cable while he was working there as a salesman and the surviving letters suggest that his custom Martin was to replace that standard 000. Most of C. F. Martin’s correspondence files from 1930 and ’31 are missing, including anything regarding Cable Piano Co. We know Martin went to the trouble to have a steel stamp made that reads “Made Especially For Cable Piano Co.” because impressions made with that stamp are in Martin’s archives. Unfortunately, no instruments with this stamp have ever surfaced, so we can’t say for certain that it was intended to be used on 000-28 Special models similar to Perry’s, although that seems logical.

Cable Piano Co. was a huge five-story building. The first floor was mostly sales, and parts of two floors were devoted to lessons while another floor included a repair shop and facilities for piano finishing (most likely refinishing). On November 19, 1936 a fire started in the finishing department and the Cable building was destroyed. Three people died in the blaze, which was front page news in The Atlanta Constitution the following day. If Perry had left Cable’s employ without taking the 000-28 Special guitar with him, there’s a chance it went up in flames along with most of the rest of Cable’s inventory. Even though Perry was no longer a salesman at the music store his business card lists “studio at Cables,” so he continued to teach lessons there. Photos in Perry’s scrapbook suggest that by the time of that fire, Perry was playing archtop Gibsons so his prototype may have been sold long before Cable went up in smoke.

SIDEBAR

Just How Different Was It?

The exact specs for the prototype Orchestra Model, built as a custom guitar for Perry Bechtel, are a bit difficult to pin down because they are scattered throughout numerous letters. Most of the neck dimensions must be extrapolated from C. F. Martin III’s descriptions of Bechtel’s “templates” and how they differed from a standard 000-28 model. For instance, Martin states that the neck width is only about 1/16″ less than that of their Standard (at that time), and since a 12-fret 000 from 1929 has a neck width of 1 7/8″, Bechtel’s guitar most likely had a neck that was 1 13/16″ wide at the nut.

Calculating the appearance of Bechtel’s guitar, however, is much easier. We know he wanted binding on both the fretboard and the headstock because the extra cost of adding those features to a Style 28 are mentioned in C. F. III’s letter to Bechtel’s boss at the Cable Piano Co. Other letters between Martin and Bechtel reference the addition of the Style 45 headplate, which at that time included the “torch” inlay, and of course the pickguard, which was on Bechtel’s earliest list of necessities.

Shown here is a recreation, by Martin's Custom Shop, of Perry's original 000-28 Special. Specs for the reissues were based on the letters in Martin's archives between Perry and C. F. Martin III, plus careful measurements of the neck on a Gibson Style O similar to the one Perry was still using in 1929.

One of the most unusual and unexpected details is the slotted headstock, something Martin apparently used only rarely on a 14-fret guitar (although Martin made quite a few Standard (12-fret) models with the solid headstock we now associate with Orchestra Models). Bechtel’s guitar also differed from the OM models made a year later in that it had a rectangular pyramid-tipped bridge. The modern “belly” bridge, still in use today, wasn’t developed until several months later.

Christian Frederick Martin III was born in 1894 in Nazareth, Pa., the first-born child of Frank Henry Martin and Jennifer Keller. Frank Henry, son of C.F. Martin Jr., was the dynamo of change at the small factory nestled on a tree-lined street just a few blocks from the town square. Under F.H. Martin’s leadership, the company grew from a small, guitars-only workshop employing about a half-dozen German-born craftsmen to one of America’s major fretted-instrument manufacturers. Martin had been stuck in a rut for decades when Frank Henry took over at the age of 23, after his father’s death in 1888. Although widely recognized as builders of the country’s finest guitars, all gut-string in those days, Martin’s annual sales had been stagnant since the Civil War, and rarely surpassed 300 instruments annually. With big factories like Lyon & Healy of Chicago (makers of Washburn guitars, banjos, and mandolins) boasting production of 100,000 instruments per year, it was clear that Martin had to change to survive.

North Street Factory circa 1900

It’s probably not a coincidence that C.F. III was born just a few months before Martin began building mandolins–and around the same time that Frank Henry broke away from a moribund New York distributor with long and close connections to previous generations of the Martin family, both in Germany and America. Along with consolidating and standardizing Martin models, introducing mandolins and issuing the company’s first catalog, Frank Henry began to aggressively push distribution of the company’s instruments into new markets on the west coast of the continent. By the time C.F.III was old enough to sweep floors and wind strings at the small factory adjoining the family home, crates of Martin guitars and mandolins were being shipped to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with some then making the long boat ride to Honolulu.

CF Martin III and his mother, Jenny Keller Martin

C.F. III, called Frederick, and later Fred, by family and friends, had a brother one year his junior, Herbert Keller, with whom he played guitar and mandolin duets at social functions in the greater Lehigh Valley. Even today, C.F. III is the only Martin to have headed the company and performed on its signature product in public. What was far more important in his father’s eyes, however, was for Frederick to become the first Martin to attend college, and both he and his brother graduated from Princeton. While the boys were draining the family coffers in nearby New Jersey, their father embarked on an even more ambitious expansion of the company business and began building ukuleles and steel-string guitars for the new Hawaiian music craze. (Frank Henry had other financial obligations besides his immediate family–he was also responsible for supporting his mother and two unmarried sisters.) Frederick did well in college and had hoped to continue his studies at Harvard; he was even considering a career outside the Martin orbit, but around the time he graduated the family company was beginning its greatest period of growth, and he was needed back in Nazareth.

CF Martin III and brother Herbert c. 1898

Although Frederick had served time at virtually every workstation on the factory floor, his education made him far more valuable in the office. Before he could spend much time there the United States finally became embroiled in “that awful German war,” and both Frederick and his younger brother answered the call. Poor eyesight kept C.F. III out of the army, and he instead volunteered for the army YMCA, served as a secretary for that organization in Georgia and later taught soldiers in North Carolina how to read. Another volunteer at the school in North Carolina was a young woman from Atlanta, Daisy Allen, whom Frederick married in 1920.

Martin factory workers c. 1906, Frank Henry Martin (2nd from left), Frederick (2nd from right)

Herbert on mandolin and Frederick on guitar, the only Martin family members known to have performed on the instruments that their family built

C. F. Martin III returned to the fold in Nazareth while the company was in the midst of its greatest period of expansion. The little Martin Guitar & Mandolin Company, prompted by Harry Hunt of the Ditson Company in New York and by Frank Hart’s Southern California Music Company in Los Angeles, had been one of the first to take advantage of America’s growing love affair with Hawaiian music and, specifically, the little ukulele. Frank Henry began making special instruments for both companies in 1916, which required an expansion of the factory the following year. In 1915, Martin hadn’t even been able to sell 200 guitars and only about 300 mandolins. By 1920, however, guitar sales were more than 1300, mandolin production topped 1500 and more than twice that many ukuleles were sold. Frank Henry and factory foreman John Deichman had their hands full training dozens of new workers and, thanks to the war, they could no longer count on finding German immigrants already skilled in fine woodworking. Herbert Keller, who had always been more handsome and self-assured than his older brother, went out on the road as a salesman for Martin’s ever-expanding line of fretted instruments. Frederick helped oversee production, but his most important role was as the chief correspondent in charge of answering the flood of mail that now streamed into Martin’s office.

While Frederick and his brother had been away at college and, later, fulfilling their obligations during WWI, their father had made some dramatic changes in how Martin conducted its business. Starting with Ditson and Southern California Music, Frank Henry had begun to build instruments for a number of different companies, including industry giant Wurlitzer, that were sold under their well-known trademarks rather than simply under the Martin brand. Many of these had special features unlike stock Martin models, and most of them had unique model codes as well. Needless to say, keeping all the different models straight for the flood of orders was no easy task, especially since many of the custom-brand accounts were also ordering stock Martin models at the same time. Martin was soon making every variation of ukulele imaginable: five soprano models, plus koa versions, taropatches and tiples. More than a half-dozen different mandolins were offered as well.

The Martin guitar line was even more confusing: the company was filling huge orders for its new Hawaiian and other steel-string models, now including tenor guitars, while still trying to keep its old gut-string customers happy. A look at Martin’s production log of the period is enough to make one dizzy, and in the midst of it all was Frederick, trying to keep the peace when orders were delayed, a ukulele was cracked in transit or a long-standing dealer was furious over new competitors on his turf. Twenty-five years later, when he was finally in charge of the company, C.F. III would greatly simplify Martin’s model line and sell its wares primarily through distributors; looking at the nightmare of confusion Frederick had faced when he came back to Nazareth with a new bride, it’s easy to see why he would do so.

Fortunately, the Martin Company has kept many of the files from this hectic period in its history. Always frugal, the office protocol was to type the answer to any correspondence using carbon paper so the back of the original letter had Martin’s reply copied on it. Despite being several months behind in production, Frederick still patiently answered virtually all requests for custom instruments, or sales pitches about a new patented improvement, no matter how outlandish. His replies were often something like this: yes, the plans for a self-tuning guitar are interesting, but the company is too busy to explore it further; or, sorry, because of the backload of orders for existing models we cannot entertain a custom order for a double-neck taropatch at this time. Some of Frederick’s correspondence with longtime favorites, such as American Guitar Society founder Vahdah Olcott Bickford, was downright cozy, with concerned reports on the health of their respective parents and shared seeds for their gardens. Regardless of the topic, C. F. Martin III was always polite without being condescending and, with most business letters, he stuck to the point of the matter without being dismissive. Compared to current business policies in the music industry–and especially compared to smash-mouth emails and online postings–Frederick’s letters to even the most combative customers were usually courtly in both manner and content.

The demand for ukuleles and steel-string guitars had led to another expansion of the Martin factory in 1924, with a second story being added to that new building the following year. Ukulele production peaked in 1926, with more than 14,000 of the little instruments sold that year alone. From that point on, the Hawaiian music craze began to decline, but Frederick and his father had far greater worries. In 1927 Herbert Keller died suddenly of peritonitis, and C.F.III was soon sent out on the road as Martin’s salesman. Retailers might have been surprised to meet Frederick after previously being called upon by his younger brother. Herbert had been closer to the stereotypical traveling salesman of the roaring ‘20s: single, confident, well-dressed and a bit of a ladies’ man. Frederick was well-dressed, but that was probably where the comparison ended.

Both C. F. III and his brother Herbert were in attendance at a Martin Company picnic in the summer of 1926. This is perhaps the last photo of them together, as Herbert died the following January.

In 1928, he hand-delivered a custom 000-45 to an entertainer who was performing in New York, and that guitar would have a tremendous influence on the company’s future. Jimmie Rodgers, widely credited as the Father of Country Music, had ordered his dream Martin with his name in bold block letters on the fretboard and his signature vocal style, “Blue Yodel,” lettered on the headstock. Rodgers would die of tuberculosis just a few years later, but the guitar continued to advertise for Martin for another four decades–in the hands of Ernest Tubb. Although Frederick wasn’t a fan of Rodgers’ music, he certainly recognized the man’s status and wrote a personal congratulatory note on a small paper label just inside the soundhole. Pearl-bordered Martins with the singer’s name inlayed on the fretboard quickly became the rage, and Gene Autry, who idolized Rodgers, ordered what is perhaps the most famous Martin guitar of all, the first D-45.

From the letters he left behind, it’s clear Frederick did as little as possible to boost the sale of such stage guitars. In one letter he cautions a young Autry that such decoration “would be purely ornament and would not improve the tone at all,” to which Autry probably muttered the 1930s equivalent of “well, duh” and then ordered another helping of flash. Other letters suggest that Frederick wasn’t a fan of the big dreadnoughts in general: “Frankly, we do not recommend a guitar as large as this because the tone becomes unbalanced, the bass being too heavy in proportion to the treble.” Even as late as the mid 1930s, Frederick still advised potential customers that the 0-28, Martin’s original concert model, “delivers the most pleasing, balanced tone.” Balance, whether in a business letter or in a guitar’s tone, was of utmost importance to C.F. Martin III.

And he had more on his mind than just Martin guitars and the men and women who made them. As his grandson later pointed out, Frederick’s role model was Woodrow Wilson; he considered himself a Wilsonian Democrat and he believed that a businessman should repay the community that supported his company with more than just the payroll. Frederick started the Lions Club in Nazareth and served as president of the school board. He also helped found the local YMCA, was on the hospital and library boards and aided in funding the library.

North Street factory in the early 1930s. The expansions on the left allowed for greater guitar production years later but were paid for by the ukulele boom of the 1920s.

The ukulele boom slowed dramatically in the late 1920s and then went bust–along with most of the rest of the music industry–when the Great Depression took hold. Frederick didn’t play much of a role in the innovations that sparked what is now considered Martin’s golden era. The 14-fret OM model and the resulting modernization of the dreadnought, two of the most copied guitar shapes in history, were the work of Frank Henry, Deichman and possibly others at the factory. But Frederick also had little to do with Martin’s now-notorious flops of the same period: its ill-conceived archtop guitar and mandolin models that paled in comparison to Gibson’s efforts. As Martin would prove again a few decades later, flattop fretted instruments were what it did best.

CF Martin III and family c. 1940

By the time the Depression loosened its grip, Frank Henry Martin was 70 years old. C.F. III now had two young children, Frank Herbert and Pamela, and as his father slowly retreated, he also had increased responsibilities at the factory. Frederick continued to serve a variety of civic functions in Nazareth, including chairing the local Selective Services Board, and made long walks (with lots of stairs) through the factory every day to check on his community of workers. But the renewed prosperity at the end of the Depression didn’t last long before the onset of World War II brought new challenges, both in terms of restrictions on the amount of brass and steel the company could use and in the loss of many key craftsmen to military duty. Martin’s archtop guitars, which needed heavy metal tailpieces, were the first to be discontinued and would never return. Many other Martin instruments were dropped from the price list, including the pearl-bordered guitar models, because of the difficulty in acquiring certain key supplies during the war years.

Frederick and Daisy's home as it looked in the 1940s. He lived here until his death in 1986.

Frank Henry Martin retired in 1945 and died just three years later. Now in his early 50s, C.F. III was fully in charge of the instrument factory he’d worked in for more than 30 years. Unlike his father, however, Frederick did not seek change and innovation. After the tumultuous years of the Depression and the long war, he sought stability for his workforce and found it in the steady demand for Martin guitars and ukuleles. Many of the instruments that had been discontinued during WWII were reinstated in the company’s catalog, such as tiples and the plainest of the carved-top mandolins, although the pearl-bordered guitar models that would later become the stuff of legend were not revived.

Although Martin is known for big Dreadnoughts and pearl bordering, the plain Style 0-15 introduced in 1940 is a better example of C.F. III's Spartan tastes.

Unlike Martin’s archtops, which fell victim to a lack of demand as much as to wartime restrictions, their 000-42 and D-45 models sold quite well in 1941 and ’42. Demand was high for fancy stage guitars, as witnessed by Gibson’s success with its big SJ-200, and the materials and talent needed to make pearl-bordered guitars was readily available. Despite the fact that most of the workers who had made the last D-45s less than a decade earlier were still on the payroll, Frederick kept the relatively Spartan D-28 as Martin’s highest model. Given the comments in Frederick’s earlier letters about the unnecessary “flash” of pearl-bordered guitars, one can’t help but wonder if leaving the fancier models out of the catalog wasn’t the new boss’ way of putting forth his own vision of the ideal Martin guitar. He didn’t drive fancy cars or wear flashy clothes and, perhaps unconsciously, his company’s guitars reflected a similar sensibility.

Throughout the 1950s and early ’60s, C.F. III’s reluctance to change his company’s instruments meant that Martin guitars were pillars of quality–in terms of both materials and workmanship–in an industry looking for every possible shortcut that modern manufacturing could offer. Gibson even went so far as to use hollow injection-molded plastic bridges, fastened to the soundboard with machine screws, on all but its highest flattop models. Such visible compromises were only the tip of the iceberg; the rush made by Martin’s competitors to shave minutes from the total “build time” inevitably resulted in a slow and subtle degradation of tone in their guitars. In contrast, from 1947 until 1964 (when Martin moved from its old multistory North Street factory to a modern building on the outskirts of town) the changes in Martin guitars were limited to its tuners and to minor adjustments in pickguard and headstock shapes.

Frank Martin, his father CF III and Bob Johnson, c. 1962. This photo was intended to show Martin's wide range of guitars from the 0-16 NY to the new F-Series electric.

Frederick didn’t have it his way for very long because there was another engine of change named Frank Martin, one with a radically different head of steam than his grandfather, Frank Henry. Frank Herbert Martin, C.F. III’s son, had joined the company in 1955, the same year that C.F. IV (or Chris, the current CEO) was born. Frank Herbert had shown no interest in guitars (or the family company, for that matter), but his passion for sports and sports cars gave him little financial success; he turned to the family business out of pure necessity.

Around this time, the Martin Guitar Company saw an incredible growth in demand as a result of the folk revival. As American youth stampeded back in time to embrace the music of Depression-era hillbillies, union organizers and newly rediscovered blues singers, Frank led his company in a headlong rush to modernity in an effort to capitalize on the increased demand for acoustic guitars. One of his first moves was to hire salesmen that would take orders that Martin couldn’t fill. Kids were being told they’d have to wait up to two years for a D-28, and Frank Martin, perhaps more than any other Martin before him, knew what could happen to the dreams of youth in two short years. In 1963, the company’s last full year at the old factory, it sold approximately 6,000 guitars, about what production had been for more than a decade. In 1966, production was above 10,000, and by 1971, the year Frank Herbert replaced his father as president of the Martin Organisation, the number had more than doubled.

CF Martin III with his grandson, Chris c. 1970.

Frederick, in his late 70s at this stage, still made his daily rounds of all the workstations, while Frank and the rest of the front office crew rarely stepped off the carpeting. As acoustic guitar sales began to decline and the company’s debts from Frank Martin’s ill-advised expansions outside the guitar field became troubling, a new personnel manager (also named Frank) was hired to get the workforce in line. Instead of the traditional monthly meetings with management, the workers now received formal documents, written by lawyers, demanding numerous concessions over such issues as vacation days–and going to the parking lot to close your car windows when a thunderstorm rolls in. Martin’s guitar makers responded by joining the largest union they could find, an AFL-CIO affiliate that happened to represent workers at the local cement plant. A strike was called in September of 1977, and 180 Martin employees walked out. Unlike most strikes, salaries weren’t the issue.

The strike lasted eight long months. Frederick couldn’t bear to cross the picket lines in the parking lot and had someone drop him off at the front entrance instead. Whenever strikers were interviewed for the local press, they mentioned the difference between the current Martin leadership and the way Frederick treated them. Instead of letters from lawyers and closed doors to the front office, they were used to seeing “the Old Man,” as they affectionately called him (when he wasn’t within earshot), face to face almost daily. Frederick was stern and often critical–and perhaps his daily visits to each workbench weren’t always appreciated–but the workers never had to go looking for him. As one striker had mentioned, “He always found time to talk to you.”

Still on the job, CF III at the factory in the late 1970s

The strikers eventually rejected the union and came back to work, but it was a hollow victory for Frank Martin’s corporate style. By 1982, with annual sales below 5000 guitars per year and many workbenches cloaked in cobwebs, the board of directors had asked for his letter of resignation. C.F. Martin III had been grooming his grandson Chris in the earlier Martin tradition and, still chairman of the board at 90 years old, he prevailed in getting young Chris a position as a vice president in the wake of Frank’s departure. A year before his death in June of 1986, Frederick made a rare public appearance at the Symposium of American Lutherie held in nearby Easton, Pa., and spoke of his love for the primary material ingredient in his life’s work:

“I confess, I am in love with wood. Wood to me has personality. It talks to me in its grain, in its consistency, in its hardness or softness, in its music. The vibrating wood…just a plain reed vibrating in the wind is musical.”

There are a lot of instruments made at the old North Street factory–during C. F. Martin III’s long tenure–still vibrating out there today, guitars of all sizes and styles plus mandolins and ukuleles, playing every possible type of music all over the world. Their sheer number and variety represent an unparalleled legacy, and somewhere among all that music is the spirit of Frederick himself, a plain reed who didn’t start the Martin tradition, but who certainly kept it alive.

Sidebar

Dick Boak

Remembering C.F. III
by Harold Fethe

Returning to active work at Martin at an advanced age, C.F. Martin III took hardly any salary. He allowed his immense holdings of Martin company stock to be valued at zero, which enabled the company to pass muster with the banks that were descending upon them — and to avoid bankruptcy. Dick Boak (pictured here) has been a Martin employee for nearly 30 ears and is currently director of artist relations. Here he offers a few other snapshots of Fred Martin from a time when “the Old Man” was in is 80s and 90s:

Sales manager Dick Rusk got word from his reps that Johnny Cash wanted them to make him a Martin D-35, stained black. Fred Martin, a traditionalist who shunned custom projects, said “Absolutely not. We don’t make black guitars.” Not willing to give up, Rusk managed to get a black D-35 made clandestinely and delivered it to Cash. Later on, Martin happened to watch the opening episode of Columbo’s third season. In it, Johnny Cash played the role of Tommy Brown, a musician whose guitar was stolen, and the world’s only black Martin D-35 played the role of the world’s only black D-35! Afterward, C.F. III was good-natured about how he’d gotten the runaround in his own shop, saying, “Well, you put one over on me there.”

At one point, Martin was developing a 7/8-size dreadnought. Fred Martin happened by when it was being strung up. When strummed, it rattled, producing what violin makers sometimes call a wolf tone. Someone asked Fred if he could make any sense of the problem. He said, “My grandfather taught me, never have an area bigger than three inches by three inches that’s unsupported by a brace. This area here is too large. The angle of this tone bar seems to be too steep; should be more gradual.” A second prototype, built with Fred Martin’s changes, solved the problem.

Fred Martin happened upon the test of the scaled-down dreadnought because of his lifelong hands-on management style, which preceded the Management by Wandering Around prescription advocated by Tom Peters and other management gurus of the late 20th century. Boak says, “He would always walk around the entire plant, every day, and knew everybody by name. He was a little hunched over by then. I never knew why, but he would walk with his left hand behind his back, maybe with his thumb hooked into his left middle belt loop or the waist of his pants. People really appreciated his visits and the personal nature of his caring.”

Notoriously frugal, Fred Martin hated waste. During WWII, when graphite was scarce, he would fit copper tubing to impossibly short pencil ends around the Martin factory, to get the last use out of them. As long as he worked at Martin, he would regularly look through trash cans at workstations and, if he saw sandpaper he thought had not been fully used, he would pick it out of the trash and put it back on the workbench.

Describing how he liked to be treated, he frequently used the phrase “average Joe.” He never asked for, and never liked, being referred to as “Mr. Martin.” Boak describes a common scene where admiring workers and visitors to the Martin plant, out of respect and affection for him, would address him as “Mr. Martin.” He’d keep trying to get them to treat him like just another guy. In a typical exchange, he would say, “It’s all right–you can call me Fred.” The other person would say, “OK, Mr. Martin.”

The C.F. Martin Company stands tall above all other American ukulele manufacturers, both in terms of numbers and quality. The small company from rural Pennsylvania also offered a wider variety of ukulele models, and for a much longer period of time, than did competitors such as Lyon & Healy and Gibson.

Martin, rarely known for having its finger on the pulse of American popular music, was not only right on target when it came to the style and sound of its ukes, it was also there at the very beginning of the initial Hawaiian music craze in 1915. Martin continued to make excellent ukes, and kept them in its catalogs, long after construction of quality ukuleles had been abandoned by all but a few builders on the Islands.

Hawaiian guitars and ukuleles took their place alongside banjos and standard guitars as evidenced by this band of sailors from the 1920s.

But ukuleles from Nazareth, Pennsylvania? Stodgy German immigrants, who inventoried every stick and string in their factory–right down to pencil stubs and half-used bars of soap–embracing the instrument symbolic of a carefree, South Pacific lifestyle? The ukulele and Martin would seem to go together about as well as coconuts and sauerkraut, but instead, it was like a match made in heaven. How could that have happened?

If you ask anyone at C.F. Martin that question, the answer will be that its success with the instrument was because the ukulele is a simple, miniature guitar, and Martin, of course, was good at building guitars. But the answer is more complex than that. The real reason has as much to do with timing, and the Martin company’s close connection to the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California, as it does with the structural nature of the ukulele itself. Most everyone who’s aware of the C.F. Martin Company knows its classic American story, how a young German guitar-maker named Christian Frederick Martin traveled to New York in 1833 and began a guitar-making dynasty now known the world over. Even most knowledgeable Martin fanatics assume that Martin began as a small shop and slowly but steadily grew and increased production until the folk boom of the 1960s, when all hell broke loose. Although such a slow-grind-to-success story is tempting, that’s not how it happened. Though Martin was established as the premier American guitar company as early as the 1850s, substantial growth eluded the Martins for over half a century. In 1888, 22-year-old Frank Henry Martin took the helm after the sudden death of his father, C.F. Martin Jr., and inherited an old-world company in which he was the only American-born craftsman. Unlike his father, who focused primarily on family, church and community, Frank Henry looked at the bigger picture and saw Martin’s position in the world of business. What he saw was not a pretty sight, for America had changed, but the Martin company had not.

A century before America’s money supply would be tweaked and coddled by Alan Greenspan and his cohorts, the country’s economy would roar ahead, then sputter and sometimes stall. As one financial crisis after another gripped the banking establishment and the business sector, Martin’s sales would nearly grind to a halt during these periods. But in the West, money would rarely be so tight, and those made newly rich by mining, lumber and other frontier pursuits spent their winnings easily. After the financial panic that crippled business on the East Coast in the early to mid-1890s, Frank Henry broke away from a long-established New York distributor, and began dealing with retail accounts on his own. By shortly after 1900, an increasing percentage of Martin’s instruments were heading west, and two of the biggest accounts were in Los Angeles and Honolulu.

Another of Frank Henry’s early changes at C.F. Martin came at around the same time. In those days, Martin repaired not only its own guitars, but virtually any instrument made of wood. Soon after the mandolin craze hit America in the late 1880s, mandolins in need of help began to appear at Martin’s door. In 1896, probably after examining a few Italian-made “bowl-back” mandolins, Frank Henry broke with Martin tradition and offered a line of mandolins in a separate catalog. (It was actually the company’s first catalog, all it had offered before was a price list.) The results of this venture into mandolins were encouraging, and in some of the years that followed Martin built more mandolins than guitars. The company also began building larger batches of the relatively inexpensive models, producing 144 Style 0 mandolins in 1906 alone. This was high production for a company that produced only a few hundred guitars each year, spread out over a dozen widely different sizes and styles.

Ten years after Frank Henry Martin first tried building ukuleles, the Martin Company introduced this first uke catalog.

Unfortunately, there are no surviving records to suggest what inspired Frank Henry to first try building ukuleles in 1907. Chances are good that repairing a real Hawaiian uke wasn’t the key, for Martin’s first ukes had spruce tops and too much bracing, and were a failure. For the next eight years, Martin continued building only guitars and mandolins, and except for a rare special order, all the guitars were intended for gut strings. Music industry giants, like Lyon & Healy and that newcomer, Gibson, were reaping the rewards brought by the mandolin fad and the increased popularity of the guitar. But Martin was barely able to sell 500 instruments per year.

Southern California Music, with stores in Los Angeles, San Diego, Pasadena and Riverside, and Bergstrom Music in Honolulu were two of Martin’s largest accounts. Another key account was the Oliver Ditson stores in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, and as one of the nation’s largest music publishers, Ditson would certainly be the first to notice that Hawaiian-themed music was the new rage, and not just in sunny California. There’s no way of knowing exactly why Frank Henry decided to give ukes another try, but there’s no doubt about the results. The combination of the 1912 Broadway show “Bird of Paradise,” which featured five Hawaiian musicians, followed by the overwhelming popularity of the music coming from the Hawaiian Pavilion at San Francisco’s 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition, was probably what shoved the conservative guitar company in a radical new direction. No doubt his key dealers, especially those in California and Honolulu, told him the Hawaiian musical surf was up, and Frank Henry dove in. This time, someone at Martin must have had their hands on a real Hawaiian uke, for the bracing was kept to a minimum, the bodies were all mahogany, worked very thin, and the resulting tone and volume was just what was needed. Martin made about a dozen soprano ukes at the end of 1915, and the following year the orders poured in.

The more expensive guitars and ukes mentioned in this ad from early 1917 were ones made by Martin but with the Ditson brand.

The year 1916 was a key one for Martin, for along with the addition of ukuleles made under its own brand, the company began an aggressive “custom brand” business. This meant building exclusive models that were sold under a retailer’s own name. Many of these had no markings indicating they were made by Martin, and before 1920 most of them were either ukuleles or Hawaiian guitars. The two largest accounts of this type were Ditson and Southern California Music. It is difficult today for us to recognize what a strong and immediate commitment Martin made to the instruments needed for the new Hawaiian style of music, but the numbers tell the story.

In 1914 Martin sold 226 guitars and 300 mandolins. 1915 was even worse, with only 162 guitars but 305 mandolins. Production figures for 1916 were similar, with 181 guitars and 240 mandolins, but that year there was an all-important difference: Martin made an estimated 1,370 ukuleles! Of course ukes were far less expensive than guitars, but Martin wasn’t making many expensive guitars at this time anyway. Its most popular guitar models, the 0-17, 0-18 and 00-18, sold for between $20 and $30 (retail), so thirteen hundred ukuleles, even if only retailing for about $10 apiece, generated more revenue than the old reliable Martin guitars. It’s important to remember that these numbers represent just  the first full year of production, and with little or no promotion.

Yet even such impressive figures don’t tell the whole story. That same year Martin was making guitars for both Ditson and Southern California Music, but without Martin serial numbers. We don’t know the exact numbers and dates for Ditson-labeled guitars, but in less than two years Martin made 270 guitars in three styles for Southern California Music. These were made with koa bodies, including the tops, and though they had regular guitar necks and raised frets, most were sold as Hawaiian guitars. These were Martin’s first production steel-string guitars as well as the first the company made with all-koa bodies. Southern California Music Company was banking heavily on the Hawaiian connection: some of these earliest models were sold with “M. Nunes & Sons Royal Hawaiian” peghead decals and paper labels, though later versions had regular Martin serial numbers and a less deceptive “Rolando” trademark. Martin wasted no time in bringing out its own koa-bodied line of guitars, and sold over 250 0-18K models alone in 1918. You don’t have to be a math whiz to recognize that instruments intended for playing Hawaiian music represented a vast majority of Martin’s business during this period, with ukuleles leading the way.

Perhaps Hawaii deserves credit for the inspiration, but the Islands got a lot of instruments in return: Martin sales records from the 1920s show hundreds of pounds being shipped to Hawaii each month through the Panama Canal. Martin only put serial numbers in its ukes for the first few months of production in 1916. This means that unlike the company’s guitars, we don’t have any way of accurately determining how many of each different model were produced. But thanks to Mike Longworth’s research through Martin Company production and sales records, we do have quite accurate uke production totals for each year. Martin’s catalogs during the same period also show the company’s commitment to expanding the uke business.(1)

Style 1 uke from early 1916, serial #105

Three soprano models, all in mahogany, were initially cataloged in 1919, and even Martin, always loathe to sing its own praises, sounded downright bullish when summarizing its new ukes:

“Eighty-six years’ experience in making high-grade instruments tells on them. They were a success from the start and they challenge the world today.”

At the same time Martin introduced taropatch versions of each of its three uke models, using a larger body and longer string scale. They were called “taropatch fiddles,” and with eight strings tuned with wooden friction pegs, they must have been quite challenging to tune. This may account for the fact that few were sold, making taropatch Martins quite rare in comparison to its soprano ukes. In 1920 koa versions of all three uke and taropatch models were offered, and these first appeared in the 1923 catalog. This same year marked the first catalog appearance of the deluxe pearl-bordered 5-K, and that deep-bodied loudmouth with ten steel strings, the tiple.

In 1925 Martin expanded its ukulele family of instruments even further, adding the simplest uke the company would ever offer, the Style 0, which was described as “plain, neat, serviceable.” The Concert model, which was the same size and string scale as a taropatch but with only four strings, also made its first appearance that year. By the time the 1927 catalog appeared, Martin’s stable of ukes reached its zenith, with nine ukuleles, six taropatches and three tiples. This was also when Martin’s uke production hit its peak, with over 14,000 ukuleles and almost 700 tiples produced in 1926. Since Martin gave its tiples serial numbers in the same series as regular guitars, it’s easy to note that tiples represented 15% of the company’s guitar production in that year. The only other significant uke model to appear was the tenor (1-T), which debuted in 1928, but by that time the ukulele fad was seriously fading, and Martin’s sales were less than a third of what they’d been earlier. During this period of uke model expansion, very few new Martin guitars were introduced, and with the exception of a tenor guitar, most of those new models were Hawaiian guitar variants such as the pearl-bordered 00-40H.

The list of instruments on the cover of Martin's 1927 catalog shows the influence of the Hawaiian music craze.

Martin had expanded one of the main buildings at the North Street factory just as the ukulele boom started, but another building was needed by 1925. Two years later a second story was added, and the number of Martin employees increased dramatically during this period. Fortunately, though its uke sales began a steep decline in 1927, Martin’s guitar sales were steadily improving, as it was finally switching to steel strings on most models. Thanks to its success with ukuleles and Hawaiian guitars, by the 1920s Martin was finally a business force to be reckoned with in the music industry, instead of just a small group of old-world craftsmen being left behind. The profits from ukuleles had allowed Martin to enlarge its factory, and it had up-to-date woodworking machinery to facilitate what was, at least to Martin, high production.

When the Great Depression hit in 1929, the lessons learned from building thousands of Style 0 ukes would be put to good use, as Martin followed the same no-frills, all-mahogany formula in making its low-cost Style 17 guitars. Though big Dreadnought models from this “Golden Era” (1931-1944) are what established Martin’s reputation with modern-day flatpickers, it was the vast numbers of smaller, plain guitars that paid the bills and kept the company afloat. Largely thanks to its connection to Hawaiian instruments, and its aversion to banjos, Martin suffered fewer setbacks as a result of the Depression than did any of its competitors.(2)

Along with Martin's other instruments, ukes got the gold script logo on the headstock in 1932.

As Martin moved toward what would later be called its best era for guitar production, the not-so-little guitar company in Nazareth was an established force in the American musical instrument industry, and bore little resemblance to what it had been before the uke-rush. Old-world ways still persisted, but now they were combined with modern production muscle and cash reserves. The North Street factory, with its vast labyrinth of multi-story additions, origin of the world-famous guitars played by Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry, Hank Williams and an endless list of current household names, could logically be called “the house that ukes built.”

But musical fads that go up fast often come down hard, and Martin’s uke sales during the Depression must have made Frank Henry wonder if the little instrument would soon disappear altogether, for by the mid-1930s only a few hundred were sold each year. Though koa models and taropatches were dropped from the catalog, Martin still showed four soprano ukes, plus the concert and tenor models, throughout the war years for the early ’40s. By this time most other American manufacturers, with the exception of Harmony, were putting little energy into ukes, but Martin was rewarded for its loyalty when sales began to pick up again in the late 1940s. Frank Henry Martin died in 1948, but his son, C.F. Martin III, saw to it that little changed at the Martin factory.(3) In 1950, Martin’s uke sales were greater than any other year excepting 1926, and almost 12,000 were sold. As demand for Martin guitars grew in the 1950s, resulting in long delays for musicians who wanted the increasingly popular Dreadnoughts, the company still fielded an extensive uke line and showed impressive sales totals hovering around 4,500 annually. The baritone model was added in 1960, but as folk music soared, Hawaiian music soured, and 1964 was the last year Martin ukuleles pulled their own weight.

Martin's ukuleles last appeared in their catalog in the early 1970s.

Though uke sales fell to mere dozens in the late 1970s and ’80s, Martin still offered Style 0 and Style 3 sopranos, plus the tenor and baritone models. The new “suits” at Martin would have gladly dropped them altogether, but C.F. III persisted. As a young man barely 20 years old when the ukulele had rescued the Martin company from near oblivion, C.F. III knew the role the little instrument had played in his company’s history, and felt it deserved to stay. The ukulele lost one  of its most stalwart champions when he died in 1986, at the age of 91.

Although Martin ukuleles have dramatically increased in value in recent years, often outperforming the company’s guitars as investments, most of the mahogany models are still under-priced compared to what they would cost if Martin were to make them today.(4) Of all the high-quality American instruments likely to be found in an attic or on the top shelf of a closet, it seems a vast number are Martin ukuleles, perhaps because their small size makes them easy to store and then ignore or overlook. The Martin Style 0 uke, in particular, is a bargain for uke players who want a piece of ukulele, and Martin, history. As musical instruments, the words from Martin’s first catalog listing of its ukes still rings true: “they challenge the world today.”

Martin's pearl-bordered Style 5 soprano uke is considered the high point of American ukulele manufacturing. This example was a gift from C.F. III to his wife Daisy.

(1) During this period Martin often used the following sequence when introducing new instrument models, and ukes are no exception. First, samples were made and a few sent out to key retailers. If response was positive, more were constructed and offered to dealers through single-page catalog additions. If all went well, an instrument introduced in such a way might make it into the next year’s catalog, but it’s not unusual for a new Martin model to first appear in one of the company’s catalogs two or even three years after it was introduced.

(2) Those instrument companies, such as Paramount, that had relied on banjos suffered the most, and few of them survived the Depression. Most of the survivors, such as Vega, never regained their pre-Depression Era status. Not only was American musical taste leaning away from banjo sounds, but WWII restrictions on the use of metals during the war years further hampered banjo manufacturing.

(3) Many uke players feel that Martin’s post-WWII mahogany models, at least those made before the mid-1960s, are superior to the earlier version, though its koa models are the most highly regarded.

(4) I’m not including the current Martin S-0 uke in this evaluation, since it is made in Mexico and is not of the same quality as the Nazareth-made ukes.

“Lucian Blaga” was a made-up name a friend of ours came up with for the paper labels he added to string basses imported in small batches from Romania. These basses were excellent quality for the price, and since the 1988 Summer Olympics were on everyone’s mind, well, you’ll understand when you read it. And yes, in those days they were still making Levis jeans in San Francisco (sigh).

The second piece was just an invitation for people to drop by the store and share a little holiday cheer with us. Today we’d need a tanker truck full of egg nog if only a fraction of our customers showed up, but back then, a few half gallons of Bud’s Egg Nog was enough for a Gryphon party. We probably even had some left over.

Printed in Gryphon Gazette October, 1988:

Lucian Blaga Basses, They Stand and Deliver

If you play stand-up bass, you know good basses are hard to find. Most of them are plywood, and anything that big takes a lot of abuse when hauled around, resulting in crunched edges, broken neck joints, and worse. The sum of all this is that most used basses sound mediocre and look like…well, they look terrible. New basses, however, cost several months’ wages or are laminated monstrosities better suited as a wooden sleeping bag for your St. Bernard.

Enter Lucian Blaga, our swashbuckling Romanian hero who, with a slash of his chisel and a hard pull on his trusty drawknife, transforms mere spruce, maple, and ebony into fantastic instruments to rescue forlorn bass players needing a quality acoustic bass at an affordable price. Riding through the dark forests astride his trusty steed, Strad, Lucian searches for the tallest, straightest trees from which to make the basses that bear the ancient name “Blaga.”

The muscular Lucian dreams of the day when bass carving is added to the Olympic games and a gold medal gleams in the Blaga family trophy room, outshining the rusty swords and moth-eaten boar’s heads of his ancestors’ exploits.

Later, from deep in the crumbling family castle, his young bride cries: “Lucien, carve basses more, send basses to Freesco. Tell them send me many Levis pairs, 501 buttons, no zeepers.”

Really, folks, we have these great new basses from Romania. LUCIAN BLAGA BASSES have solid carved spruce tops, ebony fingerboard and tailpiece, engraved gears, solid maple backs and sides and a fine amber-shaded finish.

More extras than a Yugo, and sure to last 100 times longer! These European basses are bar better than anything we’ve seen from Asia. We’ve set them up with Dr. Thomastik “Superflexible” strings ($114 a set) and they sound great! These are real basses, for $1295. Check ‘em out here, or if you’re ever in Romania, bring lots of Levis!

Cold Bud Day at Gryphon

Yep, it’s time for a little holiday cheer here at Gryphon so we’re starting a new tradition. “Cold Bud Day” will be Saturday, December 17th. Just step up to the counter and say “Gimme a cold Bud” and we’ll do just that. We’ll hand you a cold cup of genuine, world-famous Bud’s egg nog!

We’ll keep a pitcher of ice water nearby, so if you want a “Bud Light” you can add a little to your Bud’s egg nog and viola! A Bud Light! Fewer calories, same robust flavor, only less of it. Of course you can always bring a hip flask to produce, you guessed it, Bud Lightning!

You all know Gryphon handles only the best, and that’s why we’re serving the richest, most fattening, artery-clogging goo to be found. We’ll probably also have some other health food for you too, like chocolate chip cookies. So walk right in, then waddle out feeling guilty, isn’t that what the holidays are for? Come in early to start the day off wrong, then come back later and finish it off! Unlike that stuffy sociable at Aunt Hilda’s you can’t get out of, you won’t have to worry about the rug here. It already needs cleaning.

OK OK, if you insist on being a spoil-sport, we’ll also have some Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider so you jogger types won’t have an excuse to boycott Cold Bud Day. Just don’t look for any bran muffins.

All kidding aside folks, we hope to see you on Saturday, Dec. 17. Many thanks and Happy Holidays to you all.