A History of the C.F. Martin Company Ukulele
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.