Month: February 2010

Circa 1932 Stella Concert. Photo: Michael Wright.

Had blues legend Huddie William Ledbetter (a.k.a. Leadbelly) not played a Stella 12-string, the brand might only have been remembered as the name on cheap, faux-finished birch acoustics that poured out of the Harmony factory in the 1960s.

But, in fact, the brand as represented by this circa 1932 Stella Concert, has a long and honored place in guitar history as part of the legacy of the Oscar Schmidt company.

Detailed documentation of the Schmidt company awaits further scholarship, but the rough outlines are known. Oscar Schmidt was born in Saxony, Germany, and was trained as a bookbinder. He moved to America, where in 1879 be began a music publishing company. He was apparently successful, and at some point began manufacturing musical instruments on which to play the music he published. Evidence suggests this occurred by the 1890s, at least, when American guitarmaking really took off. In the late 1890s, Schmidt began using the Stella and Sovereign trade names, although they weren’t registered until 1909. At some point he opened a large instrument factory at 57 Ferry Avenue in Jersey City, New Jersey. The company incorporated in 1911.

By around 1899 or so, Oscar Schmidt was supplying the better-grade guitars offered by Sears, Roebuck & Co., as well as some offered by its competitor, Montgomery Ward, the two great retail catalogers of the 19th century. Typically, Sears catalogs, at least, would feature two pages of guitars reflecting upscale models chiefly (though not always exclusively) by Schmidt, with budget models mainly by Harmony. Schmidt guitars typically featured spruce tops and solid bodies, often rosewood or mahogany. All had, of course, ladder bracing. Many were quite ornately inlaid and featured pearl or marquetry trim. The early Schmidt bridge is easily recognized: take a common pyramid bridge and scoop an oval or teardrop-shaped piece out on the inside on either side of the saddle. Oscar Schmidt was one of the few companies to continue to put position markers at the 10th rather than the ninth fret into the 1930s, a relic of the mandolin orchestra craze of the 1880s and ’90s.

Schmidt instruments were also widely distributed by some of the top musical instrument distributors and carried brand names including Lyra, Carl Fischer, U.A.C., and Avalon. Victoria-brand guitars were built for Buegeleisen & Jacobson. Later on, Schmidt made guitars bearing the Galiano name, and may have made some Bruno guitars, though Bruno had manufactured its own in the 19th century.

While Oscar Schmidt provided better guitars with solid timbers, cheaper guitars typically were built of hardwoods and usually finished with faux wood grains. The identifiable Schmidts seen in catalogs are of the former but it is highly likely that they also made the lesser models, as well. Indeed, based on later examples, Schmidt’s Sovereign line probably represented its better guitars, while its Stella brand consisted of its more plebian, birch-bodied guitars. This was certainly true by the time the guitar shown here was made.

By the 1920s, Oscar Schmidt was being promoted as one of the largest musical manufacturers in the world, with a number of factories both here and in Europe. It operated music schools and even sold instruments door-to-door. Oscar Schmidt even operated what was probably the first music advertising agency called Manufacturers’ Advertising Company in Newark, New Jersey.

Circa 1925, Harmony, which was by then owned by Sears, replaced Oscar Schmidt as the supplier of the retailer’s better guitars.

In 1929, while visiting one of his European factories, Oscar Schmidt died. Months later, the stock market crashed. The Schmidt estate’s musical interests were held in trust by a bank that subsequently folded.

By the time the Stella Concert shown here was made, both Oscar Schmidt and the country, indeed the world, were in hard times with the Great Depression. People could not afford expensive guitars. Many of Schmidt’s Sovereigns were decked out in gold-sparkle plastic trim, known at the time as “tinsel,” instead of more expensive pearl. Stellas, on the other hand, often sported what was known as “decalomania,” colorful decals to make their humble construction seem attractive.

Based on clues from various catalogs, this concert-sized Stella is probably from around 1932. It has a solid spruce top with birch sides and back and a glued-in hardwood neck. The dark brown “mahogany” finish is fairly typical of the time. The fingerboard is ebonized hardwood. The rosette is stenciled, with the floral decalomania under the strings. The trapeze tail tells us it was made for steel strings. Since the neck is not reinforced, silk-and-steel are the better part of valor, although this guitar survived with a relatively straight neck. Like many of its kind, it required a little regluing to put the body right.

If you are an acoustic guitarist enamored of the best tone you can get, you will probably not pay this guitar much attention. The sound is a bit thin with that funky quality heard on so many pre-war acoustics. Probably a function of the birch as much as anything. But if put yourself back around the campfire on the way out of the Dust Bowl to California, playing a guitar like this can bring its own kind of pleasure!

Not long after this guitar was born, Oscar Schmidt, as we knew it, changed hands. In 1935, its guitar production was taken over by one James Carver, operating under the name of Stella Co. Carver was not able to salvage the business and sold the Stella and Sovereign brand names to Schmidt’s long-time rival, the Harmony Company, in 1938. The first Harmony Stella and Sovereign models appeared in the 1939 catalog. These sported a new, round shape almost identical to many of Carver’s guitars, suggesting they also got the jigs.

Finding good examples of Oscar Schmidt guitars is increasingly difficult, but many were made, so they still abound. Knowing what to look for is often key. And there are a growing number of collectors turning their attention to these fascinating bits of history.
To tap into the world of Stella guitar collecting, visit stellaguitars.com.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s July. ’07 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

Photo: Kelsey Vaughn. Instrument courtesy Jason Davis.

Grammer guitars, made in Nashville in the ’60s, are easily recognizable by their oversized pegheads, pickguards and bridges – not to mention the typical blue, yellow, or green sunburst finishes – and they seem a perfect complement for the gaudy stage clothing worn by country artists of the era.

However, underneath the cosmetic excesses was a serious guitar. Moreover, the Grammer name transcended country music, and it was the only guitar of the era (with the arguable exception of Sho-Bud pedal steels) named after – and designed by – a bona fide star guitarist.

Billy Grammer was born in southern Illinois in 1925. After serving in the Army during World War II, he worked as an apprentice toolmaker at the Washington Naval gun factory, acquiring skills that he would later put to good use designing guitar-production equipment. He began playing professionally in 1947, when legendary country music promoter Connie B. Gay hired him at WARL in Arlington, Virginia. Through the early ’50s, he backed up such country artists as Hawkshaw Hawkins, T. Texas Tyler, Clyde Moody and Grandpa Jones. His career took a giant step up in 1955, when he replaced the chronically tardy Roy Clark on WARL’s “Town and Country Time.” Hosted by Jimmy Dean (who would later have the pop hit “Big John”), the show was aired nationally on CBS.

Dean moved up the ladder to network TV in New York in ’58, leaving Grammer wondering where his own career was heading. He didn’t have to wonder for long. In nearby Baltimore, record promoter Fred Foster quit his job at ABC Paramount to start a new record label called Monument, and he asked Grammer to be Monument’s first artist.

Foster had found a song on a Library of Congress recording called “Gotta Travel On.” As Grammer recalled, “It was an old lady from North Carolina with a plectrum banjo, no tempo or nothing, sounded like it was 10 minutes long.” The singer was one Mary Bird McAllister, and the field recording was made by folksinger Paul Clayton, who developed the song with Pete Seeger and others into a version that the Weavers folk group recorded. Grammer started working it into a commercial tune, using his home tape recorder. “On one cut, I started it, and it was a little too low,” he said. “And right as I decided it was too low, I modulated up. It was still too low, so I modulated again.”

Foster brought Grammer to Nashville to cut the tune with an A-team session group that included Chet Atkins, Ray Edenton (rhythm guitar), Floyd Cramer (piano), Bob Moore (bass) and Buddy Harman (drums), plus members of the Jordanaires and the Anita Kerr Singers providing sing-along background vocals. Atkins played a signature opening lick on his low-E string, along with a bouncy electric guitar rhythm part. The key changes from Grammer’s home tape made it into the final production.

The timing could not have been better. For all practical purposes, the folk boom had begun in September, 1958, when the Kingston Trio released “Tom Dooley.” Two months later, Monument released “Gotta Travel On” by Billy Grammer. Although the song would become a folk staple, Grammer gave it a pop treatment, and it became an across-the-board hit, peaking at #4 on the pop charts, #5 on the country charts and #14 on the black singles charts. Grammer moved to Nashville, joined the Grand Ole Opry, and embarked on a successful solo career.

In 1964, with demand growing for acoustic guitars, Grammer decided to make his own. He put up $18,000 for a controlling interest and teamed up with Nashville music store owner Clyde Reid and Nashville guitar builder J.W. Gower to form the RG&G guitar company. To unlock the secrets of fine guitars, Grammer took his personal Martin D-18 and Gibson J-45 and sawed them in half so they could be inspected inside and out.

Grammer settled on a dreadnought body style, 151/2″ wide, with a 241/2″ scale. Necks would be available in three widths. Although labels had a blank space for a model number, there were none. With the help of Fred Hedges, Grammer drew up the design features and also designed the production equipment. The first Grammer guitar didn’t meet Grammer’s standards, so he sawed it up. Finally, in March, 1965, the first Grammer guitar made it past Grammer’s quality control saw, with a wholesale price of $127 and list of $395.

Serial numbers started at 1000, and in the three years Billy Grammer ran the company, they did not reach 2000. This month’s feature is #1264, which places it in the company’s first year. The wide points on the lower corners of the peghead also identify an early example. It has maple back and sides (Brazilian rosewood and ribbon-grain mahogany were also offered). The two vertical lines of inlay on the fingerboard became one of Grammer’s signature features.

Grammer’s recording success proved a double-edged sword, as it left little time for the problems facing his company – particularly the difficulty of getting good materials. So, in ’68, he sold the company to Ampeg. The contract included a royalty on every guitar and a reversion clause in the event Ampeg stopped building Grammers.

With Ampeg’s ownership, the G in the Grammer logo was changed from upper-case to lower-case. And that wasn’t the only aspect that went “down.” Although Ampeg was in good financial shape, the needed money and materials never made it to the Grammer factory in Nashville. In the meantime, the company began giving away Grammer guitars – something Billy had never done, not even to fellow recording artists.

According to an account by Rob Kilgore, a man named Ralph Fielding (who was unknown to Grammer) acquired Grammer from Ampeg in 1971 and promptly lost it when he defaulted on a construction loan. Steel-guitarist Roy Wiggins, who had been instrumental in bringing Grammer and Ampeg together, then acquired control, but was unable to revive Grammer. In ’72, the equipment, materials, and the lease on the building were auctioned to pay business taxes. Resonator guitarmaker Tut Taylor and his son, Mark, bought everything except the Grammer name. Billy Grammer died in August of 2011, at age 85.

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

Epiphone’s Zephyr Emperor Regent of the early 1950s represents not only the most deluxe electric guitar the company ever made, it also marks the culmination of a 20-year rivalry with Gibson that kept both companies at the forefront of innovation through the 1930s and ’40s.

Epiphone and Gibson had peacefully coexisted in the 1920s. Epiphone was well-established as a leading banjo maker, based in New York and headed up by the dashing man-about-town Epaminondas “Epi” Stathopoulo. Gibson, known as a mandolin and guitar company, had struggled to develop a competitive banjo, but in the meantime had developed a superior archtop guitar (the L-5). When the guitar began to rise in popularity toward the end of the decade, Epi saw the changing tide and took decisive action. In 1931, Epiphone “attacked” Gibson’s ownership of the archtop market by introducing nine new “Masterbilt” archtop guitars.

Through the 1930s, the continuing one-upsmanship between the companies pushed the development of both acoustic and electric guitars. When Gibson “advanced” the size of its archtops and introduced the 18″ Super 400, Epiphone responded with larger bodies – 3/8″ larger than the equivalent Gibsons. To top the Super 400, Epi introduced a new model that was a full half-inch wider. It was called the Emperor.

As the Emperor reigned over Epiphone’s acoustic line, the company battled Gibson in the electric guitar trenches. Epi fired the opening round in 1935 with its first electric models; Gibson countered with an electric Hawaiian by the end of the year and its first electric Spanish by the end of 1936. Epiphone’s Herb Sunshine developed a pickup with six height-adjustable polepieces in 1937, and Gibson followed suit in 1940. Gibson introduced a line of upright basses (and violin family instruments) at the end of 1939; Epi was in the upright bass business by mid 1940.

Meanwhile in the acoustic archtop arena, Epiphone introduced optional blond finishes on the Emperor and Deluxe by May 1938. Gibson kicked off 1939 with blond L-5s and Super 400s and then introduced cutaway bodies on those two top models. Epiphone pushed blonds harder in 1940 by introducing the Ritz and the Byron, available only in blond. Before Epi could offer cutaways, however, World War II put a damper on guitar production.

After the war, Gibson focused on electrics, introducing a new and improved single-coil pickup, the P-90, adding a cutaway model (the ES-350) in 1947, and two-pickup models in 1948. Epiphone was uncharacteristically slow in getting back into the competition after the war, due no doubt to the death of Epi Stathoupoulo from leukemia in 1944. Finally in 1948, 10 years after Gibson’s first cutaway guitar, Epi added cutaway options, a feature that highlighted its new Zephyr Deluxe Regent. The Zephyr Deluxe Regent was an electric version of the Deluxe Regent (Zephyr stood for electric, Regent for cutaway in Epi postwar model nomenclature), the 17″-wide model that competed directly with Gibson’s L-5. So in ’49, Gibson responded with a new model featuring L-5-cutaway body size and ornamentation. The new Gibson ES-5 was the epitome of electric guitar design at that time, sporting three pickups, each with its own volume control (and one master Tone).

That gave Gibson a total of six electric models. Epiphone had only four – the Century, Zephyr, Zephyr Deluxe and low-end Kent (introduced in ’49), all of which had only a single pickup. Epiphone was struggling financially and in its quest to maintain a position as an industry leader in innovation. The company clearly had to one-up Gibson to maintain its reputation, so in 1950 Epi pulled out its biggest gun – the Emperor – and created an electric version called the Zephyr Emperor Regent.

Just as Gibson’s ES-5 was designed as an electric guitar and not just an acoustic L-5 with pickups (that would come in 1951), Epiphone designed the Zephyr Emperor Regent as an electric guitar, with a laminated spruce top (later versions had a laminated maple top) and laminated maple back and sides. It featured the same fancy ornamentation as the acoustic version, including pearl block inlays with abalone wedge, Frequensator double-trapeze tailpiece, multi-ply binding and gold-plated hardware. In keeping up with Gibson’s ES-5, the Emperor featured three pickups. And to top the ES-5, the Emperor offered a more practical, more versatile pickup selector system with six pushbuttons. While the ES-5 player could dial in an infinite range of pickup mixes using the individual volume controls, the ES-5 would not allow such a simple maneuver as switching from one pickup to another; that required turning down the volume of the first pickup and then turning up the volume of the second. The Emperor player, however, with the press of a button could switch to any one of the three pickups individually or to any of the three possible pairings of the pickups. The only combination that was not available was all three pickups together. The only drawback to the pushbuttons was that switching was noisy, so it was not advisable to switch pickups with the volume up.

It would seem that the Zephyr Emperor Regent had once again pushed Epiphone out in front of Gibson in the innovation race, but it was a hollow victory for Epiphone. First of all, the Emperor’s pickups (which are today known as “New York” pickups) were weaker than Gibson’s standard P-90s. But it really didn’t matter at that point, as Epiphone’s days were numbered. Since Epi’s death, his brothers had not gotten along, and they had split in 1948. Orphie Stathopoulo, who gained ownership of the company, worked a deal with the Continental distribution company (owned by the Conn band instrument company), which gave Continental some sales territories and also control over manufacturing. In ’53, Continental moved production from New York to Philadelphia, but with few craftsmen or supervisors experienced in making guitars, the move proved to be a killing blow. Orphie and his brother, Frixo, reconciled in 1956, but it was too late to save the company and they sold it to Chicago Musical Instrument Company, Gibson’s parent, in ’57.

The Emperor’s switching system remained better than any three-pickup switching system ever developed by Gibson. It inspired Gibson to overhaul the ES-5 to create the ES-5 Switchmaster in 1955, which featured a choice of individual pickups as well as all three pickups combined, but no two-pickup combinations. In ’58, Gibson began fitting the Les Paul Custom with three pickups, but its pickup selector had only three positions, making it less versatile than the Switchmaster’s four-way. When Gibson reintroduced an electric Emperor as a thin-body model in ’58, it still had three pickups but it had the Les Paul Custom-style three-way system still in use today on the LP Custom.

So even though Gibson ultimately won the war with Epiphone, the Zephyr Emperor Regent’s six-pushbutton switching system remains the winner of the last battle between the two guitar companies.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s August 2007 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.