Month: September 2005

Longtime vintage guitar enthusiasts are probably familiar with one of the icons of solidbody electric guitars – the late 1940s Bigsby instrument built for legendary picker Merle Travis. The guitar now sits on permanent display (alongside Les Paul’s “log,” another icon) in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. The Bigsby’s single-cutaway body and “pre-Fender, Stratocaster-like” headstock are easily recognized facets of this historical fretted electric instrument.
But that’s not how the guitar originally look-ed.
Longtime California luthier (and Merle Travis fan) R.C. Allen was interviewed by Vintage Guitar in l994, and his friendship with Travis, as well as Mr. Allen’s own Bigsby guitar (the second one made) were cited in our conversation. When comparing his 1948 Bigsby electric guitar (which he purchased used in ’52) to the original Travis Bigsby, Allen noted his own instrument was actually the first to have the scrolled headstock that wound up in a similar configuration on the Fender Stratocaster more than half a decade later.
“It belonged to a player named George Grohs,” Allen said. “He’d built Paul Bigsby’s shop in exchange for the guitar. Grohs designed the peghead of this guitar. Originally, Merle’s peghead was different; the scroll on it went the other way. He got Bigsby to change it like this one, which was the second one made; Merle’s was the first. Neither guitar had a cutaway originally, either.”
And here’s how the Merle Travis Bigsby looked in its original configuration. Mr. Allen recently presented Vintage Guitar with this photo of Merle Travis and Ginny Cushman, a member of his band. According to Allen, the original photo was found on the wall of a pizza parlor in Santa Barbara, California, which is owned by Cushman and her husband. Allen noted the only other time this photo has been seen in print was in a small Merle Travis fanzine.
Close inspection of this grainy photograph (which, according to Allen, was taken in late ’47 or early ’48) reveals the guitar is indeed a non-cutaway instrument with an extra portion of scrolled wood trim where the cutaway would ultimately appear. The shadow from Travis’ left hand causes a shadow that looks sort of cutaway-ish here, but don’t let that fool you.
Even tho-ugh the end of the headstock isn’t in the photo, it obviously doesn’t have a scroll (a la the Stratocaster), even though other parts of the headstock exhibit “pre-Fender” influences. Curiously, the guitar only has two knobs instead of the three now found on the Travis Bigsby, nor does it have a toggle switch (which would end up being installed near the inlay of Travis’ first name on the wood scratchplate).
Allen believes Merle Travis had his guitar modified with a “Fender-ish” headstock (and, most likely, the cutaway) soon after Travis saw the Grohs Bigsby, which was completed in August of ’48. When Allen acquired the Grohs Bigsby, he returned it to the builder for its own modifications. In his ’94 interview, Allen recounted: “After I bought George Grohs’ Bigsby in 1952, I took it to Paul Bigsby to make it just like Merle’s, which meant my Bigsby got a cutaway, an armrest, a pickup ring, and a bridge like Merle’s instrument.”
Note, Allen doesn’t mention the headstock style in his list of modifications.
The Grohs/Allen Bigsby’s headstock is also shown here; the entire instrument can usually be seen at the Vintage Guitar booth during Los Angeles-area vintage guitar shows, courtesy of Mr. Allen.
A recent addition to VG’s exhibit has been the Standel amplifier hand-built for Merle Travis by Standel founder Bob Crooks, and the most recent show (in September, 1997, at the Orange County Fairgrounds) included a display of an R.C. Allen guitar the luthier built in the ’60s for Roy Lanham (of the Sons of the Pioneers), and recently restored by Allen.
So apparently, a relatively-unknown player and builder named George Grohs may deserve more credit and/or notoriety for a certain facet of the legendary Bigsby-Fender solidbody guitar controversy. Merle Travis’ guitar may have been the first Bigsby Spanish electric guitar ever built, but the second one appears to have been the first to feature the headstock silhouette that is probably a large part of discussions concerning the earliest California-made solidbody electric guitars.
And as an intriguing coda, note the two templates used by Paul Bigsby in his work on headstocks and armrest trim (not surprisingly, they are also owned by Mr. Allen). As for the seventh hole in the headstock template, Allen reports the only reason it’s there is so Mr. Bigsby could hang the template on a nail on the wall of his shop!

Willie G. Moseley’s fourth book, Guitar People, is scheduled to be released in 1997.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s Dec. ’97 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

The list of folks who use Tim Scheerhorn’s guitars reads like a who’s who of resonator and slide guitarists. Jerry Douglas, Mike Auldridge, Sally VanMeter, Rob Ickes, Ben Harper, Phil Leadbetter, and Jimmy Stewart all rely on their Scheerhorns. What is it that causes these artist to faithfully flock to these unique axes? VG talked with Tim Scheerhorn by phone from his workshop in Michigan.

Vintage Guitar: The first question is of all the instruments in the world to build, why square-neck resonator guitars?

TS: I’m a player and I wanted to build something I couldn’t buy. I was fortunate enough to show my first guitar to Mike Auldridge in 1989. That instrument was built in April of ’89, and I was scared to death. I was in awe of the man and asked if he had a few minutes after one of his shows. He opened the case, his eyes popped, and he sat on the fender of his car for an hour and a half, playing it.
Two weeks later I got a wonderful letter: “It was a pleasure to look over your guitar. It was honestly the most beautiful guitar of its type I have ever seen. More importantly, it sounds wonderful. It is very difficult to tell what a guitar will sound like over a sound system or a recording studio when you play it live. I would love to have the opportunity to test drive one of your guitars in one of these environments. I feel pretty sure it would pass the test with ease…”
Anyway, he’s totally responsible for me building more.

VG: How many do you build a year?

TS: About 40; that’s a good number. They are all built to order and I have 50 on backorder. [There is] a 14-month wait, and a tremendous number of people want to know if I have any scratch-and-dents. I don’t.

VG: How do your guitars differ from the traditional dobro?

TS: They look like a Dobro and have Dobro parts – the cone, the spider, the assembly using a quarterman cone. But I do things different inside. I realized what we have here is a speaker cabinet. I studied bass reflex principles and realized there is air in there that has to do something to complement what’s going on. Consequently I don’t have the traditional soundwell construction. My whole motive was to build an acoustic guitar and let the wood work acoustically, as well as the mechanics of the resonator.

VG: Your guitars are made of solid wood, as opposed to the traditional Dobro, which is a laminate.

TS: Right. Solid wood from day one. Occasionally, Dobro would build a wooden instrument. It’s rare to see one in the pre-war days but in the OMI days they made special-order solid-wood instruments. The problem with them was that they had a sound well, which meant they tied the back to the top and locked all the resonant qualities of the top and the back.

VG: What’s a sound well?

TS: A sound well is a ring of wood with holes drilled in it. It sits underneath the cone, and the top and assembly are glued to it. Dobro tried to sell this as a great idea because it made the guitar indestructible. I’ve seen photos with guitar bodies stacked up with a guy standing on top of them. I’m building a musical instrument, not a piece of furniture. I’m sure I couldn’t stand on mine.

VG: Some people have complained that your instruments don’t sound like a traditional dobro in that they are louder and less metallic in tone.

TS: I certainly don’t represent my guitar as traditional-sounding. It’s very contemporary. My whole motive initially was to build a resonator that could go to a jam session and be heard. I didn’t want to build an old pre-war-sounding instrument. If you want that sound, there’s a ton of them out there.

VG: Have you ever built anything besides square-neck resonator instruments?

TS: Round-necks, banjos, and resonator banjos. I’ve built eight or nine round-neck resonators and I also make Weisenborn-type lap guitars on a limited basis. There’s a big interest in the Wisenborn style. I am certainly not building a ton of them, but I built about 15 and have eight or nine on backorder. On Restless on the Farm, Jerry Douglas is playing a lot of the Weisenborn I made. He’s holding it on the inside cover photo.

VG: You destroyed a number of early instruments because they weren’t up to par. What’s the earliest instrument in the field?

TS: Sally VanMeter has number three, and she’ll never give it back because I’ll destroy it. I have repaired it. It’s popped its buttons because some of the structural integrity was lacking. It has survived 10 trips around the world and a tumble out of the back of a Bronco going 60 MPH. On guitar number six – Jerry Douglas’ first one – I decided that if I’m going to make these guitars to survive, I’m going to have to make some changes.

VG: Have the guitars evolved aside from the structural changes?

TS: The body shape of the standard L-bodies (L for large) has stayed the same. Material selection, shape, and bracing have been identical. Small things like neck width and subtle dimensional changes have occurred. I felt more comfortable adding more material on the neck width, those are things nobody but me is aware of. At a certain point, and I am trying to remember when, I did an experimental guitar for myself with a radius back that is arched from the neck to the tailpiece, it’s not like a radius back on an acoustic guitar that’s arched in two directions. All of my guitars are tapered, the tail piece is thicker than at the neck. There is a slight taper. I was building flat back guitars for a quite a few years, after I did this experimental one I decided that the radius was giving me a little more depth of tone, and at a certain point I made a running change and put on the radius back instead of the flat back.

VG: Is there more than one way to set up a resonator guitar? I know that for regular guitars there’s a myriad of ways.

TS: I strongly believe in ebony-capped maple bridges. Ebony is harder, denser, and much more consistent than maple. My experience is that the old guitars all sounded different. You could pick up 20 pre-war guitars and all will have a different quality to their tone. Part of that I attribute to the bridge insert. Some were birch, some beech, and some maple. The string slots were also all done differently. Consequently if you have a lot of variety or variation of that wood, by introducing the ebony caps on top of that bridge insert, it gives it a clearer note with more sustain yet the maple bottom provides the woodiness. This design is sort of a derivative from the banjo bridge. Banjo bridges have been that way for years. People who want a more contemporary-sounding guitar seem to prefer it.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s June. ’99 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.