Musical instruments – guitars – present an interesting philosophical dichotomy. On one hand, they’re utilitarian objects whose very purpose – arguably their only purpose – is to create art, to play music. On the other hand, musical instruments can be, and very often are, beautiful works of art in themselves. Play them or display them. It’s an age-old debate between musicians and collectors (who are often one and the same), and a fundamental issue at the core of the musical-instrument collection at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, which is celebrating the centennial of its creation. 

There’s a fascinating story behind how the MFA came to have a collection of musical instruments, and it directly reflects that dichotomy. The idea of collecting and displaying things began in the 1600s, as well-to-do (and generally eccentric) European gentlemen began to assemble “cabinets of curiosities.” These were eclectic collections of oddities that could include mastodon bones, noteworthy paintings, Leif Erikson’s sword, stuffed two-headed goats, live fish, and Egyptian mummies. In 1753, The British Museum became one of the first public museums to exhibit art and artifacts. Boston’s MFA opened its doors in 1876.

Interest in archaeology – “scientifically” studying the past – began in the 19th century and included folks like Francis William Galpin (1858-1945), who began collecting old musical instruments in England. The tale includes a generous dollop of fraud (what’s new?) and the occasional Frankenstein reconstruction because Galpin and his confreres thought the instruments should be playable. Galpin collected approximately 650 instruments and, indeed, is commemorated today by the Galpin Society, dedicated to the professional study and preservation of musical instruments and their history.

Enter Bostonian businessman William Lindsey (1852-1922), his connections to England, and (for unknown reasons) an interest in the Galpin collection, which came up for sale in the early teens. In 1915, his daughter, Leslie, married an Englishman and sailed for their honeymoon on the RMS Lusitania, which encountered German U-boats. Leslie and her new husband were killed, and the U.S. was brought into World War I. As a memorial to his daughter, Lindsey bought the Galpin musical instrument collection, donated it to the MFA in her name, and it arrived in 1917. Thus, the centennial.

According to Darcy Kuronen, the MFA’s Pappalardo Curator of Musical Instruments, the organization’s early attempts at preservation included “restoration” to playability, per Galpin’s wishes. Indeed, the arrival of the Galpin collection coincided with the interest in playing early music on “correct” instruments, a trend that swept Europe and the U.S. in the early 20th century and in which museum-held instruments played an important role. A small subset of performers who use lutes and Baroque guitars thrive to this day.

Today, the MFA has largely abandoned restoring instruments to playability in favor of historical cosmetic fidelity, however, instruments are always available to researchers, and, on special occasions, musicians are allowed to perform on “playable” instruments in the museum’s galleries. Kuronen explains that many of these performances have been recorded and as part of the centennial celebration, with video posted at youtube.com.

On November 16, the MFA will host an event with (among others) Olav Chris Henriksen playing 19th-century French guitars in duo with flutist Peter H. Bloomin in a gallery featuring French paintings of the period.

In 2000, the MFA, under the direction of Kuronen, became one of the first major art museums to feature a successful guitar-specific exhibition. Titled “Dangerous Curves,” the accompanying catalog is out of print but readily available and worth seeking out (Ed. Note: the author, a longtime VG contributor, also served as a consultant on that exhibition and provided several guitars on loan, some of which were subsequently sold to the MFA to become part of its permanent collection).

Some musicians cringe at the thought of guitars sitting in museums instead of being played onstage, as they were intended. But the reality is that there are far more guitars than musicians, and it’s certainly better they be preserved and studied – and, like many of the MFA’s collection, occasionally played – than allowed to fall apart or end up in landfills, which has been the fate of far too many musical instruments throughout the ages.

To view some of the MFA’s collection, visit mfa.org/node/9489.

This article originally appeared in VG December 2017 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

While volumes have been written about its more-famous sibling, the Stratocaster, surprisingly little attention is paid to the Jazzmaster – Fender’s top-of-the-line guitar when it was introduced in 1958. Then, again, maybe it’s not so surprising…

Out of the gate, the Jazzmaster was ill-conceived by Leo Fender and his design crew. As evidenced by its name, in ’57, Fender designed the guitar to appeal to jazz guitarists – regarded as the elite players at the time. Since jazz (as well as orchestra and studio) guitarists played sitting down, its body carves were offset to accommodate a seated position. Fender also widened the coil on its pickups to mellow their frequency response compared to the brighter, better-defined sounds of Strat and Tele pickups. While a few pre-production models had typical Fender maple fingerboards, production models (like most jazz guitars) got rosewood.

Fender even coupled a new floating vibrato with a separate bridge to be more like an archtop with a bridge and trapeze tail that decreased sustain. How many jazz guitarists used a vibrato? Yes, there was the “Trem-lock,” which allowed the guitar to function in a vibrato-free mode, but it, too, was ill-conceived. Designed for use with the heavy-gauge strings popular in the ’50s, it was best manipulated using a light touch. Also, lighter strings tended to pop out of their bridge saddles, which led to some players swapping the bridge for (of all things) a Gibson Tune-O-Matic (even if it didn’t match the Fender’s fretboard radius).

When Fender showed the Jazzmaster to players it hoped would raise its profile, reaction wasn’t particularly favorable. Some of the biggest names in jazz, including Wes Montgomery, Tal Farlow, and Jim Hall, showed little interest (Joe Pass was the exception).

To be fair, from a 1957/’58 perspective, it was not at all clear the path popular music would take in the immediate future, much less the long term. While it’s true Elvis had two hits in Billboard’s 1957 Top 10 (#1 “All Shook Up” and #9 “Too Much”), crooners still ruled the charts – Pat Boone, Tab Hunter, Perry Como, Jimmy Dorsey. Two Everly Brothers songs and Elvis’ “Jailhouse Rock” cracked the Top 20, but this was the year of “Tammy” and “Love Letters in the Sand.” No one could have known that ’59 would bring instrumental rock-guitar hits by Santo and Johnny and the Virtues (“Guitar Boogie Shuffle”). In 1960, The Ventures hit the charts with “Walk, Don’t Run.” Pop was being redefined, and fast, while jazz guitar was increasingly marginalized.

Ironically, Bob Bogle recorded the lead on “Walk, Don’t Run” – a tune written by jazz guitarist Johnny Smith – playing a Jazzmaster, though the band would soon switch to Strats and Mosrites.

Of course, while we now consider Fender’s Stratocaster an icon, there’s further irony in the fact that when guitars began to be imported from Europe and Japan, builders like Framus, EKO, Teisco produced models that emulated the Jazzmaster and Jaguar (Fender’s new top-of-the-line guitar when introduced in ’62), not the Strat.

If the Jazzmaster’s respect in its heyday came mostly from foreign manufacturers who paid more attention to catalogs than players, the ’66 example seen here gets a double whammy because it’s a CBS Fender! Though slightly lessened now, in the early days of guitar collecting, great distinction was made between CBS and “pre-CBS” Fenders; in ’65, Leo Fender, suffering from health issues, sold the company to the entertainment conglomerate at the height of the “guitar boom,” a time when makers could sell practically anything. Corporations wanted a piece of the action, and they absorbed nearly every significant American guitar maker.

Made for “Cats,” Loved by Kids!

In the late 1950s, Gibson held firm grasp on the jazz-guitar market. Its hollow and semi-hollowbody electrics – with their set necks, dressy binding, and fancy headstocks – were serious instruments for serious players. Combined with the new humbucking pickup, the company was giving most jazz players what they were looking for in terms of feel, tone, and playability. Leo Fender’s Stratocaster and Telecaster, meanwhile, were meat-and-potatoes instruments suited for staid country pickers or those playing simple rock and roll.

Seeing what Gibson had going on, Fender had to do something. If country and rock players were enamored with his Tele and Strat, surely he could build something jazz players could love. In 1957, he began tinkering on a design, creating a body with different curves, a bit more size, and slightly offset countours that gave it balance when played while seated. He also incorporated the beveled back and arm contours that helped make the Strat so popular.

Perhaps in an attempt to emulate the tones of Gibson’s humbuckers, Leo equipped the Jazzmaster with pickups that had wider, flatter coils. With an aesthetic borrowed from his early steel-guitar designs, in terms of size they did bear resemblance to Gibson’s, set apart by white covers and centered polepieces. Its switching system employed separate circuits developed by Forrest White and engaged via a slider switch above the neck pickup; the second setting let the player roll off treble and volume (like a jazzer comping behind a bandmate’s solo) without touching either knob.

Though famous jazz players of the era politely declined to play the Jazzmaster, it did catch on with younger players, particularly in Southern California’s then-emerging garage-band scene, perhaps because they heard it on records by The Ventures and The Beach Boys. – Ward Meeker

In ’66, the Jazzmaster was given new features including binding on the fingerboard and pearloid-block inlays rather than the old-school dots. There was also the oversized “CBS” headstock.

In ’65, Fender renovated its painting facilities, and one result was that sunburst finishes changed from a gradual brown-red-yellow transition to harder edges, an effect Jazzmaster fans call the “target” sunburst. And, while our featured guitar appears to be a solid chunk of alder, it was, in fact, made of five or six plies of wood, filled in with sealer, painted with a neutral white undercoat, then given a woodgrain treatment before receiving the sunburst.

Electronics on the Jazzmaster, developed by Forrest White (an industrial designer who served as Fender’s GM from May of ’53 to December ’67), are typical of many ’60s guitars. The assumption was that a guitarist would play in lead and rhythm modes. The two white knobs (Volume and Tone) controlled the lead circuit with a three-way select. The sliding switch above the strings put the guitar into Rhythm mode, controlled by the Volume and Tone thumbwheels which ran through a capacitor that further mellowed the tone (White’s prototype was profiled in the October ’14 issue of VG).

Jazzmasters came with a variety of funky accessories, including the Parker Body Guard – a plastic shell that protected the back and edges – and also apparently damaged the finish as it deteriorated over the years.

The Jazzmaster was made until 1980, then revived as a Japanese model in ’86, followed by U.S.-made models in ’99. While certainly not “rare,” the relatively low popularity and original high price make the Jazzmaster one of the less-common vintage Fenders. Custom colors are the most prized, though knowing the sunbursts are faux wood makes them very interesting. Ill-conceived, perhaps, but still venerable.

The Jazzmaster as Collectible

When it debuted in 1958, the Jazzmaster was the company’s top model. Offered with the same color options and hardware-finish upgrades as the Strat, it nonetheless has always played second fiddle.

Still, the guitar is certifiably collectible and has become more popular lately thanks to alt-rock players emulating their ’70s idols, who did the contrarian thing in employing a Jazzmaster. Examples include Elvis Costello on My Aim is True and Tom Verlaine on Television’s Marquee Moon (both from 1977). In the ’80s, the similarly influential Thurston Moore played one on Sonic Youth’s landmark Daydream Nation, while J Mascis carved a trail on one in Dinosaur Jr. In the ’90s it emerged again in the hands of Nels Cline (Wilco), Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age), and Greg Camp (Smashmouth).

From a collector’s perspective, the Jazzmaster sits a bit above entry-level/newbie status but (very) comfortably below the cash-to-burn level of a ’50s Strat/Tele. Here, from The Official Vintage Guitar Price Guide 2016, are values for Jazzmasters in excellent condition (all original parts and finish, no playing wear, minimal weather checking).

(Ed. Note: The Vintage Guitar Price Guide offers the following definitions in regard to the collectibility of custom colors. Common: Black, Blond, Candy Apple Red, Olympic White, Lake Placid Blue, Dakota Red, Daphne Blue, Fiesta Red. Rare: Shoreline Gold, Inca Silver, Burgundy Mist, Sherwood Green, Sonic Blue, Foam Green. Very Rare: Surf Green, Shell Pink.)

Year	Features	Exc. Cond. Low	Exc. Cond. High
1958	Sunburst	$8,000	$10,000
1958	Sunburst, rare maple ‘board	$7,000	$8,700
1959	Custom colors, includes rare	$8,700	$13,000
1959	Sunburst	$7,800	$9,800
1960	Common colors	$7,800	$9,800
1960	Rare colors	$9,800	$15,000
1960	Sunburst	$5,800	$7,200
1961	Common colors	$7,300	$8,800
1961	Rare colors	$8,800	$13,700
1961	Sunburst	$5,000	$6,300
1962	Common colors	$7,300	$8,800
1962	Rare colors	$8,800	$13,700
1962	Sunburst	$4,000	$5,000
1963	Common colors	$5,000	$7,000
1963	Rare colors	$7,000	$12,000
1963	Sunburst	$4,000	$5,000
1964	Common colors	$4,800	$6,900
1964	Rare colors	$6,900	$11,000
1964	Sunburst	$4,000	$5,000
1965	Common colors	$4,400	$6,700
1965	Early ’65, Sunburst	$3,900	$4,800
1965	Late ’65, Sunburst	$3,700	$4,600
1965	Rare colors	$6,700	$9,900
1965	Rare colors	$6,700	$9,900
1966	Common colors	$4,000	$6,500
1966	Rare colors	$6,500	$9,000
1966	Sunburst, block markers	$3,600	$4,500
1966	Sunburst, dot markers	$3,700	$4,600
1967-1969	Common colors	$3,700	$5,000
1967-1969	Rare colors	$5,000	$7,000
1967-1969	Sunburst	$3,600	$4,500
1970	Common colors	$3,700	$4,800
1970	Rare colors	$5,000	$6,900
1970-1980	Sunburst	$2,600	$3,300
1971-1974	Custom colors	$3,000	$4,000
1975-1980	Custom colors	$2,700	$3,400

This article originally appeared in VG July 2016 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

When traveling the American desert southwest, one should expect the unexpected. Visit in the springtime and you might witness the elusive flowering of the torch cactus, which happens on just one day each year. No matter when you visit, though, you can see 1,000-year-old Native American pueblos (complete with ball courts), marvelous relics of long-lost civilizations that thrived long before the desert itself was formed. And whenever you go, you’ll certainly want to experience the Musical Instrument Museum, in Phoenix.

Many museums contain musical instruments; Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art have excellent collections on display, though they’re subsidiary to wider assemblages of art and artifacts. There are also museums devoted to musical instruments, such as the National Music Museum, in Vermillion, South Dakota, the Museum of Musical Instruments in Hamamatsu, Japan, and the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, Belgium (which led directly to the founding of the Phoenix museum). Most display at least some non-Western instruments, especially the Ethnologisches Museum, Stattliche Museen zu Berlin.

The Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) is surrounded by sand, cacti, haggard camelback mountains, and towering palm trees. While there are plenty of densely populated parts of Phoenix – the city is 1.5 million, metro area 4.3 million souls – there are also swaths of undeveloped desert within city limits; the 20-acre campus of the MIM sits on the edge of one of these patches, just off Route 101 at the Tatum Avenue exit.

Brainchild of Robert J. Ulrich, former CEO and Chairman of Target Corporation (think “big red logo”), and his friend, Marc Felix, the MIM is intended to showcase the music and musical instruments of every country in the world. Ulrich collects African art and happens to be a museum aficionado, and the two were visiting the instrument museum in Brussels when they were struck with the idea to push the concept to the max. That did not mean simply collect and hang a bunch of drums and bagpipes. No. They wanted the visitor to understand something of the cultural context and enjoy an intimate interaction with the instruments using technology to enhance the experience.

The two created a non-profit organization and gathered a team of musical-instrument experts under the direction of Dr. Billie R. DeWalt, then dispatched it to assemble the collection. A team of architects led by Richard Varda (RSP Architects), designed a building to house the collection. In 2010, the 200,000-square-foot MIM arose after more than five years’ work and planning.

When you pull off the freeway into open desert, you might spot a dust devil spring up, wobble portentously, then drift until it hits scrub brush and promptly collapses. Take a left, and the MIM looms as a massive structure growing from a parking lot adorned by native plantings. On the outside, the facility is a huge two-story structure faced with Indian sandstone designed to represent an Arizona canyon. The entrance is set back on an inviting plaza planted with more lush foliage surrounding babbling brooks, allegorical sculptures, and outdoor seating for the museum’s Café Allegro. Enter through the large black-glass doors and you’re bathed in natural light as the canyon metaphor continues with a meandering central corridor dubbed “El Rio.”

Basically, MIM’s public areas and specialty galleries reside on the first floor, while the main collection lives on the second, with its “cliffs” overlooking El Rio. The lower level hosts a gift shop, restaurant, “family room,” a Mechanical Instrument Gallery, the Target Gallery for special exhibitions, and a special Artist Gallery. Plus, there’s another gallery where anyone can play real instruments.

The Artist Gallery is where you’ll find the Martin D-28 played by Elvis just before his death in 1977, the Steinway on which John Lennon wrote “Imagine,” Carlos Santana’s “Buddha” Yamaha solidbody, the ES-345 Eric Clapton played in the ’60s, George Benson’s Gibson Johnny Smith, and Dick Dale’s collection of Fender guitars. There are celebrity instruments sprinkled throughout other galleries – including a locally made doubleneck owned by Duane Eddy (on loan from Deke Dickerson) and Buck Owens’ Harmony-made red, white, and blue acoustic – and these often change as MIM works closely with other organizations and foundations.

The first floor also houses MIM’s 300-seat theater. In addition to complete recording studio gear, the theater is “acoustically tunable” to accommodate whatever kind of music is playing that night, which can be anything from Asleep at the Wheel to the Zydeco Experience – the schedule very heavy on guitar players. The room’s sound is sculpted with adjustable baffles and it’s booked most nights.

While the MIM is not dedicated to the guitar, its first exhibit is “Guitars: Many Forms, Many Countries” and pairs an Ampeg Dan Armstrong with a Maccaferri plastic guitar, a Gianinni Craviola with a Charturangui from India, electrics with acoustics, an Alan Gittler “fishbone,” etc. Basically, it challenges the visitor to open their mind to consider wider definitions, and it’s just a small taste of what’s to come.

In the minds of most people, the concept of “museum” involves history; it’s where you go to see old paintings, a reconstructed 16th-century Buddhist temple, or a stuffed carrier pigeon. In a way, that’s inherent in the nature of museums. Even if you put the most modern of modern art on the wall for the public to see – a painting finished just that morning – tomorrow, it will be fixed in time while the world marches forward. History.

MIM contains many old instruments, so it is intrinsically historical. However, it also houses many completely new instruments, so “history” is not a big enough idea to encompass the MIM collection. Again, one of MIM’s missions is to show the cultural context of the music. That might mean showing a Mariachi costume on a mannequin next to the bajo sexto he might play. But, it also might mean showing an acoustic guitar from the ’30s next to a monitor with an old piece of video of the Carter family. Walk up to the Klezmer display and be treated to antique video of a raucus orchestra.

Plus Audio
Most museums today use headset stations where a visitor listens to a curator’s recording on the importance of a specific element, especially during special exhibitions. MIM goes one better; visitors receive a wireless headset with a detection feature, so as one walks toward a display, relevant audio turns on. If there’s video, it syncs with its audio track. As much as possible, curators let you hear the very instruments you’re looking at, or one almost identical to it. This all feels very natural and adds an immersive dimension to viewing the instruments.

While an historical perspective is one way to parse the MIM collection (its oldest instrument is a Chinese drum dating to 5000 to 4000 BC!), its primary organizing principle is geographical, not historical. Think of the second-floor galleries as a massive map of the world and you’re a giant, able to stride around it in a couple hours. Begin in Africa and the Middle East, stroll over to Asia and Oceana, then Europe, the United States and Canada, and finish in your trek in Latin America and the Caribbean. Each of these continental galleries is subdivided into constituent countries and territories, more or less arranged as you’d find them on the map. Thus, you might move from instruments found in the Arabian peninsula to those found in Syria, then Iraq, etc.

Another way you might slice and dice the MIM collection is to look for comparative relationships between instruments within a particular kind of music – say Arabic or Latin American – that you can investigate sometimes by moving just a few feet away! Or perhaps you want to compare bowed instruments from different parts of the world. It’s all there. In the past, the only way you could see and compare musical instruments this way was with an authoritative book compendium. Now, the real thing is right in front of you.

There’s also a strong nod given to instrument making. MIM maintains close relationships with many manufacturers and salts its displays with things like a luthier’s bench contributed by C.F. Martin. And, of course, there’s a purely aesthetic dimension. The people who make musical instruments like to make them pretty and, wherever practical, curators have chosen examples that show off the bling. A pearl-encrusted l’oud with a delicately carved rose? Check. A finely carved Chinese horsehead peghead? Ditto.

That said, the curators are not loath to show the curious but sometimes unlovely “folk” side of instruments. For example, there’s a fascinating handmade guitar from the African bush that looks a lot like Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein! Clearly, the maker had some idea of what the parts needed to be, but wasn’t so clear on how to put them together (and how it would actually be played is something else altogether!).

As an aside, MIM is active in educational and outreach programs, not the least of which is the Paraguay’s Recycled Orchestra, a remarkable group of children who play instruments fashioned from trash – old cans and wire – salvaged from the local garbage dump. Some of the instruments are on display with an accompanying video.

The MIM collection is mind-bogglingly vast. On display are more than 15,000 instruments and related artifacts from more than 200 countries and territories. Plan for your dogs to be sore and your brain to be a little numb when you exit the MIM. Also, plan not to see everything in one single visit!

Obviously, an exhibit of musical instruments will require the ability to conserve/restore them. MIM maintains a state-of-the-art lab where, for example, a stunning and rare James Ashborn Model 6 was recently brought back to life after enduring decades of neglect in the back of a closet. Also obviously, not every instrument MIM owns is on display. Behind the scenes are row after row of instruments in carefully climate-controlled storage. Hundreds of vintage acoustic guitars wait to be included in an exhibit, all delicately supported by linen straps and perched on little pillows individually shaped to fit the instrument, sewn by MIM volunteers.

Back on that fateful day when Mssrs. Ulrich and Felix perused the instrument collection in Brussels, they may (or may not) have realized they were about to bring museum history almost full circle, actually integrating many aspects of its historical tradition.

“Museums,” or at least collections, have been around since antiquity. But the modern concept of a museum dates back to around the 15th century, when the term was used to refer to the private collection (probably of art and fine objects) held by Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence, Italy. Museums as a public entertainment destination probably date back to the 17th century, when collectors of “oddities” began opening their doors to the public – for a price, of course. These museums were often called “cabinets,” and the oddities could mean anything from exotic stuffed animals to mastodon bones to historical artifacts. One of the first oddity museums in the U-.S. was opened in 1786 by Charles Wilson Peale, in Philadelphia. Around this time, displays began to include portraits of famous people and interesting paintings, especially landscapes of exotic places. One of the most influential U.S. museums in the mid 19th century was P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, in New York City, which pioneered the addition of music concerts and dramatic presentations of Shakespeare “cleaned up” and suitable for the whole family. America’s first Disneyland!

During the second half of 19th century, especially under the influence of popular World’s Fairs and new scientific approaches to organizing knowledge, exhibitions became increasingly specialized. Gone were the cabinets of miscellaneous curious oddities. Objects were separated, classified, and grouped into collections with something in common, displayed as examples of natural history, cultural history, industrial production, art and sculpture, etc.

Museums exploded during the early 20th century as great political changes re-shaped notions about public access to museum collections – the idea that great collections are part of the people’s cultural heritage. Along with the concept came the obligation on the part of the facility to elevate the public, through aesthetics, through education.

Much of this evolutionary development is reflected in MIM. It’s a musical-instrument museum, and as such is focused on a specific subject, like modern museums tend to be. Yet, the inclusion of “contexts” – the environments where the instruments originally existed, the costumes and accessories that accompany them – almost returns the concept to the cabinet, just with a relevant educational purpose. The theater is reminiscent of good ol’ P.T. The first impression is complete awe at the importance of music for humans all over the globe, and how much – often along totally independent evolutionary lines – we have managed to create instruments to make that music. And how much those creations are – never mind that they’re intended to be played – in themselves works of high art.

In the final analysis, MIM is not an “art museum.” It is the ultimate musical instrument museum. Its “geographical” organization is brilliantly neutral and its presentation masterful and state-of-the-art – an art long in development.

Special thanks to Erin Miller, Media Relations Manager for the MIM, and Rich Walter PhD, Curatorial Assistant.

From the Trove

Two Instruments Demonstrate Variety at the MIM

Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya Chaturangui

Those who appreciate the guitar owe it to themselves to visit the Musical Instrument Museum. Any fan of the guitar or guitar music and happens to live in Phoenix will likely want to visit over and over as they gain an ever-deepening appreciate for all that is contained in its walls. Here’s a look at two examples of the facility’s many and varied offerings.

Sometimes, worlds collide in unexpected ways and with unusual chronologies. The Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya chaturangui comes from India, but it’s not some ancient predecessor of Western guitars. Rather, it’s a recent creation directly inspired by the modern archtop guitar. Not only that, it was created to play traditional Indian – as well as other contemporary world musics – as a radical version of an archtop slide guitar!

One way or another, when one follows the history of the chaturangui and its style of music (sometimes called Hindustani slide guitar), all roads ultimately lead to Hawaii. There are a number of good accounts of the development of Hawaiian guitar music, and most are full of apocryphal stories one had best take with fingers crossed. The subject still needs a good scholarly treatment.

When Captain James Cook “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, they were originally called the Sandwich Islands. By 1820, they were swarming with missionaries and had become a frequent stop for whalers and merchant marines. In 1893, they nefariously came under American control, then became an official U.S. Territory in 1898.

No one knows how the guitar got to Hawaii, but in 1818, King Kamehameha the Great sent soldiers to California (then part of Mexico), where they may have encountered the instrument. In any case, the presence of missionaries and sailors after 1820 could account for it; missionaries were fond of singing hymns and sailors of dancing jigs, so guitars would be natural. Certainly, guitars and banjos were well-known in the Islands by the late 1870s, when Portuguese sugar-cane workers arrived, bringing their versions of guitars and inventing the ukulele.

Two distinctive guitar techniques developed in Hawaii, though they are by no means exclusive to the Islands. One was the use of scordatura, or non-standard tunings, usually into open chords not unlike the Russian seven-string guitar. Since this usually involves de-tuning, it acquired the name “slack-key” guitar.

The other style was the “fretting” of strings with the use of some form of “steel bar.” Some credit playing with a slide to one James Hoa in 1876, but the most accepted account has Joseph Kekuku, who, according to himself, at age 11 in 1885, was walking along some railroad tracks when he found a loose railroad spike and slid it along his guitar’s strings. Now… in 1885, a guitar’s strings would most likely have been made from animal gut; steel strings didn’t become popular on the mainland until after 1880, and that occurred very slowly. It’s possible Kekuku had steel strings, but that’s a stretch. I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen a railroad spike, and I ain’t sliding one over the strings of my guitars, even if they are steel!

The best tale is that an Indian (as in Calcutta) lad named Gabriel Davion was kidnapped by a merchant and taken to Hawaii in 1884. There, he reportedly played something called a göttuv dyam, which was played using a slide. That would provide some cool symmetry to the chaturangui story, but, like I said, cross your fingers.

Hawaiian music began to dribble into mainland U.S. consciousness beginning with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Its influence spread slowly but it was immensely popular by the teens and through the ’20s, leading to the first commercially successful electric guitars, Hawaiian lap steels, in 1931.

Indian interest in Hawaiian guitar reportedly dates to before World War II, when a Hawaiian musician named Tau Moe emigrated to India, spreading Hawaiian music and eventually teaching and building lap steels in Calcutta. Indian musician Brij Bhushan Kabra is credited with being the first to adapt the Hawaiian guitar to Indian music. Slide guitar is well-suited to Indian music because many forms like to glide (or glissando) between notes and wander above and below pitch. Kabra played a Gibson Super 400 outfitted with a raised nut and an extra drone string. Another musician, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, adopted the style and added many more sympathetic strings to a German archtop guitar, dubbing it the mohan veena.

It was probably a mohan veena that Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya modified to become the chaturangui. Bhattacharya was born into a prominent musical family in 1963 and, according to his online biography, both became interested in Hawaiian lap-steel guitar and broadcast his first radio performance at four years of age. According to online accounts, Bhattacharya invented the chaturangui in 1978 or ’79. Bhattacharya plays fingerstyle slide, composes music, and performs pretty much all types of music, not just traditional Indian, alone and with scores of other world musicians.

This Bhattacharya chaturangui was built by the Trideb International Guitar Co. (Kolkata, West Bengal, India) in 2007. The six primary strings equate to a Spanish guitar, and there are two drone strings and 12 sympathetic strings. The idea is to combine the tonalities of the rudra veena, sarode, sitar, and violin in a single instrument.

The instrument has a spruce top and rosewood body that incorporates a hollow neck inspired by Weissenborn guitars. It’s roughly equivalent in size to a large archtop.

Since the chaturangui is a relatively modern invention and is primarily hand-made, you won’t find too many “vintage” examples. However, several companies (and individual luthiers) produce them, so it’s possible to find one on the secondary market. Student-grade chaturanguis run $1,200 to $1,500 new, with professional-grade models beginning around $3,500. The fanciest versions can be exquisitely inlaid.

So, the chaturangui is really a guitar and yet another example of the amazing number of guitar progeny that populate every corner of the globe as disparate cultures collide and reassemble themselves as modern entities. If only George Thorogood would play one, it might even catch on…

1964 National Glenwood 65

Every once in a while, you encounter a vintage guitar that hits the trifecta – technology and aesthetics crossing paths with an important part of guitar history. There’s certainly a trifecta surrounding this ’64 National Glenwood 95 on display as part of the MIM’s “Guitars, Many Forms, Many Countries” exhibit.

The Glenwood was part of a group of models designed by Valco in 1961 and put into production in ’62, colloquially known as “map” guitars because, if you squint, it sort of looks like a map of the U.S. (the lower 48, at least). There should be no need to point out that Valco had a hallowed pedigree dating to the mid ’20s, when John Dopyera invented the resonator guitar in an attempt to increase the volume of acoustic guitars. In the fall of 1926, he and several of his brothers started the National String Instrument Corporation, and by ’28, they were joined by guitarist George Beauchamp.

Some of the Dopyeras left National in ’29 to found Dobro, then returned in ’32. In ’35, the companies merged. Beauchamp tried to introduce electric guitar pickups to National in ’31, but other management wasn’t interested, so he left to form Ro-Pat-In, with the intent to make electric Hawaiian lap-steel guitars with partner Adolph Rickenbacher (later Rickenbacker). In ’36, National-Dobro moved from L.A. to Chicago, the heart of the American guitar industry, and control of the company passed to Victor Smith, Al Frost, and Louis Dopyera. The name then became Valco Manufacturing. When the Glenwood debuted in ’62, the company’s name was changed to Valco Guitars, Inc.

National-Dobro had reluctantly begun amplifying guitars before WWII, but it was Valco that ditched resonator guitars and remade itself into a primarily electric guitar company. Valco, along with Harmony and Kay, would become one of the powerhouse American mass manufacturers of the guitar, serving the beginner and middle ranges of the market during the fabled guitar boom of the ’60s.

National-branded guitars were Valco’s premium range, with downscale versions being marketed as Supro models. Valco also branded some as Val-Pro, and famously supplied Montgomery-Ward with Airline brand guitars, as well as others branded Atlas and Tonemaster (England).

National “map” guitars came made of two different materials, either fiberglas or traditional wood. Fiberglas models included the Glenwood 95 (cherry red, seen here), 98 (white with black neck), and 99 (white with white neck), plus Val-Pro 82 (red, one pickup), 84 (white, one pickup, transducer), and 88 (black, two pickups, transducer); and Newport 82 (red), 84 (seafoam green), and 88 (black). Wood-bodied National maps included the Westwood 72 (blond or cherry, one pickup), 75 (black cherry sunburst, one pickup, transducer), and 77 (cherry, two pickups, transducer).

Valco’s use of fiberglas – which it called Res-O-Glas – was not confined to the map guitars; it was used on the top models in other designs, as well. Bundles of glass fibers are, strictly speaking, an ancient technology. However, as a modern medium, its discovery dates to 1935, when an engineer at Corning Glass figured out how to make glass fibers efficiently. Another glass company, Owens-Illinois, was also working on the material, and in ’38, the two merged to become Owens-Corning. During World War II, American and German companies worked on combining fiberglas with cured polyester resin to make the substance we recognize today. Around the time National’s map guitars debuted, building fiberglas canoes and other products was a popular back-yard pastime among American handymen, so it was no surprise that Valco would turn to the sturdy, colorful, and easy-to-work material.

Valco’s map guitars are among the most collectible of the company’s guitars from the Swingin’ ’60s, mainly thanks to their unusual shape and snappy hues. Guitars have pretty much had their iconic figure-8 shape since the instrument began to coalesce around 1000 AD. The 19th century saw lyre- and lute-guitar hybrids, but they’re mostly curiosities. Ro-Pat-In’s first Hawaiian lap steel was the famous “frying pan,” shaped more like a banjo, but in the general neighborhood. Cutaways appeared in the ’30s, but it was with Gibson’s late-’50s Flying V, Explorer, and Moderne that radical shapes were applied to electric guitars. These didn’t rock the world, but they did inspire bizarre imitations like the ’59 Kay Solo King (often called the “map of Ohio” guitar and possibly the ugliest design ever). This was about the time Semie Moseley flipped a Strat upside down to “develop” the Mosrite Ventures models. Obviously, being “modern” meant being non-traditional, meaning being non-Spanish in aesthetics.

Valco’s map guitars were nothing if not Spanish! As for the colors, it’s important to recall that when they were introduced in the early ’60s, “uniforms” were de rigueur for pop-music combos; the Kingston Trio had striped shirts, The Beatles had collar-less jackets and scandalous mop tops. Playing eyecatching, often matching/distinctive guitars was the cat’s pajamas. The paisley anti-uniform bell-bottoms of the hippies didn’t happen until ’67, the Summer of Love, when – perhaps not coincidentally – Valco’s map guitar bit the dust.

Then again, the map’s disappearance may have been inevitable. As the guitar boom exploded, guitar companies became targets for corporate takeovers. One of those was the 1966 purchase of Valco’s competitor, Kay, by the jukebox maker Seeburg. In ’67, Valco purchased Seeburg/Kay. In ’68, the company collapsed in bankruptcy. Cheap Japanese product is often blamed for this implosion, but it may have been that everyone who wanted a guitar by then had one. Many Japanese makers also went out of business at this time.

Nevertheless, the National Glenwood 95 reflects a golden age of guitars. Made of Res-O-Glas, looking oh so cool, and part of the rich texture of American guitar history – a trifecta in anyone’s book.

This article originally appeared in VG March 2016 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

1967, the Summer of Love. Everything still seemed possible, and anything went. No more war, racial and gender equality, Fresh Cream, the Beatles best record ever, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Phew! What a difference the next year would bring! And that applied to guitars. None more than this classic minimalist La Baye 2×4 “Six.” This is just one of the many great American guitar stories!

The legendary La Baye guitars were the brainchild of Dan Helland, at the time a guitarist and guitar teacher in Green Bay, Wisconsin. La Baye is the hoity toity Frenchified name of “the bay,” the local name for that sprawling, shallow body of water at the top of Lake Michigan just before you pass into Lake Superior. There’s more than a little humor in this because north of “the bay” is Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, home to many people of French descent.

Now, guitar players fall into two camps. The true aficionados, like wine fanatics, will swear by their combination of carved maple and lush mahogany, or maybe their basswood, or swamp ash, or whatever. The cynics say an electric solidbody is a slab of wood with a neck and pickups, and their sound is all in the electronics pushed through an amp. Helland fell into the latter camp. To him, an electric guitar was just a 2×4 with a neck. The idea of the La Bay 2×4 line became a real possibility.

The idea dawned on Helland around 1964 or ’65. He was working at Henri’s Music, an area music store chain owned by Henri Czachor. Czachor gave Helland space to work on his ideas. Helland doesn’t recall how he ended up there, but someone probably knew someone who knew someone and he hooked up with the Holman-Woodell factory in Neodesha, Kansas.

Holman-Woodell, Inc., was founded in Neodesha in May of ’65 by Howard E. Holman and Victor A. Woodell. Holman had worked for the Wurlitzer Music Company – the famous piano and organ manufacturer and instrument distributor from Elkhart, Indiana – before moving to the little town of Independence, Kansas, located a few miles to the west, where he opened the Holman Music Company store in Neodesha. Woodell was the money man described as a “former industrialist” with experience in electronics manufacturing who had already retired to Sarasota, Florida. A local guitarist and former woodshop teacher named Doyle Reading served as the company’s guitar designer. By the time Holman guitars first appeared in November of ’65, the company had inked a distribution deal with Wurlitzer to sell “The Wild Ones: Stereo Electric Guitars.”

Trouble followed quickly. Not long after the Wurlitzer line was introduced, dealers began to find the finishes flaking off and started returning them to Wurlitzer. They were not happy campers. Nor patient campers; Holman-Woodell Wurlitzer guitars and basses lasted only through 1966, maybe into early ’67, when Wurlitzer dumped the Holman contract. To this day it’s rare to find a Holman Wurlitzer with its paint intact.

The loss of such a potentially lucrative contract – not to mention the cost of doing refins – spelled trouble for Holman-Woodell. They promptly re-branded their guitars as Holmans. Right around the time of the Wurlitzer debacle, Dave Helland and his La Baye 2×4 idea entered the picture.

As you can see, the LaBaye 2×4 was pretty close to being a 2×4 board bolted to a Holman guitar neck. The Holman neck is pretty comfortable – thin, but not as thin as contemporary lines such as Kapa. The light fingerboard wood is actually an inexpensive grade of rosewood, and the inlays are real pearl. The serial number (#155540) doesn’t signify anything unless this is #40, which it very well could be… The Sensi-Tone pickups look and sound a lot like cheaper DeArmonds, but they’re genuine Holmans. The height is controlled by the number of thin plastic shims or plates placed between the top and the bottom. The vibrato was another Holman invention, a common variation on the Bigsby that appeared on the Wurlitzers. These may say “Channel 1” and “Channel 2” left over from the Wurlitzer stereo days, but this has mono output, like most Holman-brand guitars. Controls are two volumes and two tone thumbwheel knobs, like on some Fenders.

One definite design flaw is the placement of the three-way pickup select on the bottom of the guitar. It may look cool, like a rifle trigger, but there’s almost no way to play this guitar without hitting the toggle! And forget about playing it while sitting down!

So, aside from the toggle, how does it play? The neck and fingerboard are fine. The vibrato is swell. Like virtually all other Holmans we’ve seen, the pickups are just never going to win the hearts and minds of guitar players. There have been worse, but these have relatively weak output with little tonal range. But hey, the appeal of the La Baye 2×4 lies in its cool factor!

And their rarity. Helland had Holman-Woodell build him around 45 “Six,” “Twelve” (12-string), and “Four” (bass) guitars. He took them to the summer NAMM show in Chicago in ’67, where they were quite the rage… and produced zero orders. He did get some novelty pickup among a few pros; Tommy James and the Shondells played them for about 15 minutes, and a Milwaukee-area band called the Robbs donned them briefly. That was it before the La Baye 2×4 entered the annals of guitar legend. And Holman-Woodell, too. Helland became a professional photographer, and in late ’67/early ’68, the factory was sold to two folks named Al and Ray, who made Alray guitars for a limited time. But by ’68, the guitar market had gone soft and that was it for the guitarmaker from Neodesha. Leaving us with this ’67 La Baye 2×4 “Six,” one of about 45 instruments produced on the plains of Kansas during the Summer of Love, a dream unfulfilled, despite the possibilities.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s September 2008 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

Whether Valco – the company that made National guitars in the 1950s and ’60s – was actually inspired by U.S. geography when it created its legendary “map” guitars is unknown, but they may well have simply meant to be eye-catching in the dry days before the Beatles ignited the mania for electric guitars.

Whatever the truth, because the upper bout vaguely recalls the Eastern coastline from Maine to Florida, National Glenwoods, Val-Pros, Newports, and Westwoods have been affectionately dubbed “map guitars.”

This Westwood 77 was actually one of the more conservative wooden siblings in a group of guitars that showed off National’s longstanding heritage of technological innovation. Developed in 1961 and first offered in ’62, the National map line consisted of the Glenwood 99, 98, and 95, the Val-Pro 88, 84, and 82, and the Westwood 77, 75, and 72. The numbers stood for colors and pickup layouts. The Val-Pros were renamed Newport in ’63. The coolest (though not necessarily best-sounding) were the Glenwood (VG, June ’01) and Val-Pro (later Newport), which were made from the new wonder material of the time – fiberglas. National called its version Res-O-Glas.

Basically, these bodies were made by pressing glass fiber reinforcement into a mold with two-part epoxy resin. The liquid resin components hardened around the fiber, yielding lightweight (but very strong) material that could take just about any imaginable shape, including a map-shaped guitar!

The top of the map lines (99, 88, and 77) had three pickups, including two single-coil units and another of National’s innovations, an under-bridge pickup, one of the earliest transducer pickups developed before the War. Each had its own volume and tone control plus a master volume. Unfortunately, like early Strats, you could only select one pickup at a time. The middle of the line featured one single-coil and the transducer. The lower end had just one plain pickup, although a three-way switch let you cut out either treble or bass for some nifty tones.

Fiberglass makes great canoes and awnings, but, alas it ain’t that great in a guitar, so ironically the cheaper maple Westwoods actually turned out to be better-sounding. The natty three-pickup 77 came in cherry, the 75 in a black-to-cherry sunburst, and the 72 in blond. Plainer than the fiberglas models, these still had bound fingerboards and real pearl block inlays. Tuners were Kluson Deluxes with buttons made especially for Valco, mounted on what’s known as a “Gumby” headstock. The stylish fin shapes were well in line with consumer product design tastes of the times. Lucky owners got one with a matching map-shaped hard case.

National map guitars lasted only until ’65, though fiberglas was used until the company purchased Kay and then collapsed in ’68. Some map guitars were assembled from leftover parts for the asset auction in ’69, and some apparently sported Italian hardware. National map guitars are great examples of early-’60s guitar design and, while not as prized as etched metal tri-cones, are appreciated by savvy aficionados.

This article originally appeared in VG April 2003 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

Throughout most of the 1970s, Les Pauls ruled the guitar roost. But toward the end of the decade, some players became interested in more-sophisticated electronics, especially active circuitry. Suddenly, souped-up guitars by Alembic, B.C. Rich, Ibanez, and Aria Pro II surged in popularity.

This new trend did not take Gibson by surprise, and the challenge was met with one of its more interesting lines – the RD Series. At the top of the line was the luxurious Artist, introduced in ’78.

Looking a bit like ungainly reverse Firebirds, the RDs were developed in ’77 with input by jazz/fusion ace Bruce Bolen, who Gibson had hired in the mid ’70s to conduct clinics on its Maestro effects line.

Whether or not you find the shape attractive, there’s no denying that the RD Artist was well-appointed. Featuring a maple body and glued-in maple neck, the head sported a fancy engraved “winged f” inlay. Most of the ebony fingerboards were unbound, but had huge mother-of-pearl block inlays. The RDs were Gibson’s first foray into the longer 251/2″ scale. Hardware was gold-plated. Finishes were Natural, Fireburst, and Ebony. Sales literature at the time claimed that the shape was specifically designed to help balance the long scale, and RDs are indeed very comfortable to play.

However, the real interest in the RD Artist comes under the hood. The Artist was outfitted with a new set of Series VI humbuckers hooked up to a traditional three-way toggle. The pickups were preamped, with an onboard transformer and 9-volt battery. Each pickup had its own active volume control that was at maximum “normal” volume in the middle. Roll it down and cut the volume, roll it up and boost output with the preamp. Both pickups shared the tone controls, which were separate knobs for treble and bass. Similarly, these were at normal high output in the middle, with frequency boost or cut on either side. Already, this is pretty interesting… but wait, there’s more!

The RD Artist was equipped with a second three-way toggle called a “trick switch.” The middle position was “neutral,” allowing the active electronics to work as described. The front position was a bright switch that boosted the treble frequencies for cut-through on lead solos. The back position activated expander/compression circuitry. In this mode, when the bridge pickup was selected, expansion kicked in, making the guitar more responsive to picking. Expansion gives a fast, explosive response with rapid decay. When the front pickup was selected, compression was activated. With compression, you reduce the initial attack response and increase the signal sustain of the notes. This makes for a very expressive guitar.

Gibson’s RD line also included the Custom with just the bright switch and the Standard without the active electronics. The 341/2″-scale RD Artist and Standard basses followed suit.

For all their tonal flexibility, RDs were less than a stellar success. Only the RD Artist survived 1979, making it to ’82, by which time it was known simply as the RD. After that… exit stage left.

Photo: Michael Wright.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s Jan. ’04 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.