Tag: features

Behold, this specimen that checks off all the right boxes for fans of vintage amps; beautifully clean, it has a watertight provenance and emerges from a heart-warming backstory. If we love anything more than a musty old tube amp in outstanding condition, it’s a musty old tube amp with a stirring history – a tale that takes us rapid-rewind style from the present day back to a time in the mid ’50s, when this Gibson GA-20 was first bought, played, and loved.

Add the fact the 1954 Gibson ES-175 that was purchased right along with it by this amp’s original owner is featured in Dan Erlewine’s “Dan’s Guitar Rx” column this issue and, well, this is something to get excited about.

Warren Hein, 77, of Joppa, Maryland, purchased this GA-20 and the accompanying ES-175 at a store in Baltimore in 1954, and made good use of the pair until he was drafted into the Army in ’57, when he stored them in his bedroom closet and set off to serve his country. After his discharge in 1960, life “got real,” as they say, and his earlier adventures in music remained on the back burner. Work and family kept Hein busy, and the years rolled by until one day recently when he took a notion to drag his old pals out of storage. What he found were two vintage Gibson pieces in impressive condition, but in need of a little repair and freshening up after their long hibernation. Hein then had a fortuitous encounter with vintage amp enthusiast and repairman Dave Ellis of nearby Bel Air, Maryland.

“I stopped in at [a consignment shop owned by Warren and his daughter] to see if they might have any old amps, radios, or stereos I could buy to work on,” Ellis said. “Conversation led to music equipment, and Warren mentioned that he had a Gibson guitar and amp that were in disrepair. He was beginning to experience problems with arthritis in his hands, and I asked if I could get the guitar and amp repaired [so he could] use them to keep his fingers flexible.”

Ellis picked up the set, got a willing Dan Erlewine in on the guitar repair, and set about servicing the 59-year-old GA-20.

Gibson made the GA-20 in various configurations between 1950 and ’61, with this two-tone rendition in buffalo-grain with woven Saran grille appearing from ’54 to ’59 (the only real visual alterations in that span being the loss of the “20” from the front logo and changes in the input legends in the final two years). Generating approximately 16 watts from a pair of 6V6s in cathode bias sparked up by a 5Y3 rectifier with a 12AY7 in each of the two channels and a 12AX7 in the phase-inverter slot, this 1×12″ combo sat either at the lower end of Gibson’s professional-grade lineup or (depending on how you look at it) the upper end of its student range. Either way, it was a head-to-head rival for Fender’s similarly powered and proportioned Deluxe, and did pretty well at the effort, with 949 sold the year Hein bought his. If you keep a weather-eye on vintage amp listings, you get the impression that a fair number of them are still doing service in the field, too – no major surprise once you check out the quality workmanship and components found inside.

Being sympathetic to non-invasive amp restoration, Ellis took great care in bringing the GA-20 back to life. Had it been played regularly throughout the intervening five and a half decades, there’s a chance it would have kept chugging along pretty well, but the repairman knew he’d need to be careful with the long-untested electrolytics, in particular. After trying (and failing) to bring them up to voltage with a Variac (because they were dried out), Ellis found it necessary to replace the filter caps – no surprise in an amp of this age. He did, however, manage to retain all the delectable Cornell-Dubilier “Grey Tiger” tone and coupling caps, which Gibson used in guitars and amps before switching to yellow Astrons in amps in ’56, and Bumblebees and Sprague Black Beauties later in the decade (the photos here were taken by Ellis prior to the restoration, and show the amp in its original state). Ellis also replaced a few resistors where necessary with new carbon-comp types, replaced the crumbling 200-ohm “dog bone” cathode-bias resistor with a new five-watt ceramic 220-ohm resistor (which would actually keep the amp operating more to spec with today’s higher-mains AC voltages), fabricated a new spacer for the pilot light, cleaned and re-tensioned the tube sockets and inputs, added a properly grounded three-prong cord, reconfigured the input grounding to take the guitarist out of any potential electrocution loop(!), replaced the deteriorating leather handle, and performed a few other items of routine old-amp upkeep. It all sounds like a lot, perhaps, but the work introduced nothing out of spec to alter the sonic character or original appearance of the amp, while keeping it playable – just as it should be.

All fired-up and running again, this little GA-20 has a rich, round tone when played clean, and one that’s perhaps a little warmer than its familiar Fender counterpart. Cranked into mild overdrive (a condition Gibson would have considered out of spec back in the day), it becomes reedy and meatily twangy with single-coils, creamy and thick with humbuckers. The original Jensen P12R speaker sounds great, Ellis reports (though the amp would gain headroom and girth with a replacement P12Q or P12N or any of a range of Celestion options, while also saving the vintage P12R from the grave).

Top to bottom, then, this a sweet and satisfying restoration, and a happy tale of the kindness and generosity of strangers… or, strangers who easily become friends. And we can’t wait to hear how the GA-20 greets the ES-175 when that connection is re-established.

This article originally appeared in VG July 2014 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

Park 75
Preamp tubes: three ECC83 (12AX7 equivalents)
Output tubes: two KT88
Rectifier: solidstate
Controls: Volume II, Volume I, Treble, Middle, Bass, Brightness
Output: approximately 75 watts RMS

We might not expect anyone to give much of a hoot for an amplifier with “Park” on its badge – a brand that has also graced budget-grade solidstate amps from Asia for the past couple of decades – except for the fact that any player or amp collector in the know is hip to the fact that a Park from around 1965 to around 1980 really is just a Marshall by another name, and often one with a nifty twist.

This situation has set up the unusual circumstance that the sub-brand Park amps from the golden years, the point-to-point amps made from the mid ’60s until around 1974, often fetch a little more on the vintage market than their Marshall counterparts. That probably fewer than 800 or so such Parks were ever built doesn’t hurt their desirability, and the pervasive rumor that Jim Marshall made many Park models “a little hotter” than similar Marshalls coming out of the factory alongside them adds further cache to the name.

The original Park amplifier line represents a clever and rather devious piece of marketing brinksmanship on the part of Jim Marshall. In the early years of Marshall, the Jones and Crossland music store in Birmingham served as a distributor of sorts for the north of England, but was cut out of directly handling Marshall business when the company penned a bigger and broader distribution deal with U.K. music-industry biggie Rose-Morris in 1965. Store owner Johnny Jones had long been a pal of Jim Marshall’s, however, and the amp maker seemed keen to accommodate his friend one way or the other. Meanwhile, Jones and Crossland was already handling a “house brand” line of guitars and other musical instruments, apparently dubbed in honor of Jones’ wife’s maiden name, Park. Marshall and Jones devised the ploy of giving a few minor twists to Marshall-built circuits to sidestep any exclusivity issues, along with some visual alterations and the rectangular Park logo… and Bob’s your uncle; Marshall keeps on supplying its sought-after tube amps to Jones and Crossland for Birmingham and Northern England.

For the first several years of production, most Park amps followed Marshall designs very closely, and the larger heads are therefore comparable to the evolution in Marshall JTM45, plexi, and metal-panel heads from the mid ’60s to the early ’70s. Often they had black or silver control panels rather than the Marshalls’ gold, some came in taller or differently shaped head boxes, and earlier examples displayed other cosmetic tweaks such as chickenhead knobs and different control layouts and labeling. By the mid/late ’70s, Park amps had even more of their own thing going on, such as the more “basic” looking front-mounted metal control panel of the Lead 50 combo, which was also quite different internally from any other amp wearing the Marshall name at the time. Like their more populous siblings, these Parks were built with printed circuit boards post-’74, but are still great amps with loads of sonic character.

This 1972 Park 75 is of an era when the northern alternative was looking rather more Marshallesque, though it is distinctive for its silver metal control panel. It also retains the split channel volumes different from the Marshall setup with the two channel input pairs side by side, and the Volume controls following. It’s purely an alteration of layout, which doesn’t change the way the channels function, but must have provided Jim Marshall yet another way of saying, “Why, no, Mr. Rose, Mr. Morris, this is not a Marshall amp at all – it’s a Park 75!”

One of the biggest technical differences between this Park 75 and a 50-watt Marshall Model 1987 of the same era was its use of KT88 output tubes rather than EL34s (note that this example, however, has been modded by a later owner to use EL34s). Marshall used four mammoth KT88s in the Major to pump out a whopping 200 watts, and a pair of them keeps the Park 75 pretty clean and bold up to a higher point on the dial; most owners report these amps don’t start to break up until the Volume control hits 7 or 8, by which time they are moving a lot of air through a 4×12. At the same time, there’s talk of Park amps having slightly lower-value resistors feeding the preamp tubes in the first gain stage than those used by Marshall in similar circuits, resulting in higher plate voltages and, in turn, more sizzle from the amp’s front end; this might be another distinction of sorts, but in truth, some Marshall amps of the era display similar variations. One further interesting difference here is the “lie down” power transformer configuration, something seen in earlier Marshall plexis, but changed to the stand-up transformer configuration in 50-watt Marshall heads of the early ’70s.

Beyond the input stage, the Park 75 is pretty much classic Marshall all the way out – which is to say, perhaps, that it still follows the basic circuit template laid out by Leo Fender in the 5F6-A Bassman of the late ’50s. A cathode-follower tone stack offers Treble, Middle, and Bass controls, and a long-tailed-pair phase inverter delivers its load to two KT88s in fixed bias, with a negative feedback loop that is tapped to yield a Presence control (called “Brightness” here) just to further differentiate things (and again, not by much). Otherwise, from the fat “mustard caps” to the British carbon-comp and carbon-film resistors and several other distinctive components, it really is solid Marshall stock through and through – and a great alternative means of getting your Brit-rock on.

This article originally appeared in VG July 2013 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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Anyone who’s ever caught Ted Nugent on tour has seen this instrument, and during the Summer of 2003 it was intended to be the only guitar used by the Motor City Madman during his one-hour slot.

“That was pretty much due to time restraints,” said Dean Mitchell, who has been Nugent’s guitar tech for a number of years. “He wanted to just keep going, and didn’t want to have to stop to change guitars.”

In addition to being unique as a rock guitarist’s main instrument, the Byrdland is unique among Gibson electric guitars. Designed with the input of guitarists Billy Byrd and Hank Garland (the name is derived from their surnames), it was introduced in the mid 1950s as one of the company’s first “thinline” hollowbody models. Its 23 1/2″ scale is also unusual, being more typical of a student guitar than a professional instrument.

Standard Byrdlands were originally available with P-90 pickups, and acquired humbuckers in the late ’50s. Stock finishes were sunburst and natural, and Gibson made the model with Venetian (rounded) and Florentine (pointed) cutaways, as well as spruce or maple tops.

Da Nuge’s preferred Byrdland configuration is a spruce-top model with a Florentine cutaway, and Mitchell said that the guitarist has had the instrument since his days with the Amboy Dukes. It’s known as “Number 4” – Nugent numbers his Byrdlands sequentially, and the first three were lost in a fire that destroyed an Amboy Dukes trailer. Number 4 has been broken on more than one occasion, but has always been restored to Nugent’s sonic satisfaction.

The guitarist’s no-holds-barred playing style has necessitated the removal of the pickguard on all of his Byrdlands. Note the wear – down to the bare wood of the top – not only where a pickguard would have protected it, but also around the volume knobs.

According to Mitchell, the wear is due to a combination of Nugent’s sweat and his constant manipulation of the controls.

“He’s the only guitar player I know who constantly works his volume knobs and pickups,” Mitchell said. “He’s always turning up, turning down, turning up halfway, back and forth between each pickup.”

Modifications include an old Gretsch threaded strap button knob that serves as the cap for the toggle switch, and Mitchell avers that “…it’s easier for him to get at, and it looks cooler! We put those on all of his guitars.”

In 2003, the original Patent Applied For (P.A.F.) pickups, which had begun to “squeal,” according to Mitchell, were replaced by Gibson Burstbucker 2 models.

Battered, worn, and reinforced, Nugent’s ’62 Byrdland is as outspoken and unique as its owner, and Nugent has relied on its sound for many years. Perhaps Nugent’s affection and reliance on this instrument are best summed up by an anecdote recounted by his guitar tech.

“I was looking at the wear on it…” Mitchell recalled with a chuckle. “And I asked Ted if he wanted me to sand it down and put a little lacquer on there. He told me if I touched it, he’d shoot me. He wants it to be like Willie Nelson’s acoustic!”

This article originally appeared in VG‘s April 2004 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

Ed. Note: In this series, Tim Brookes attacks the common argument that the guitar in 19th-century America was small, quiet, and suitable only for young middle-class ladies playing in parlors. Part one explores what was arguably the most extensive and skillful guitar culture of the day – the generally forgotten guitar in non-English-speaking communities. The remainder of the series can be read at Part Two: Man and Machine and Part Three: Women.

“Over the last century,” began a recent guitar history, parroting conventional wisdom, “The guitar has evolved from a parlor instrument for young urban ladies.”

Of all the insults the guitar has had to put up with over the last 500 years, the most common and most infuriating is that during the 19th century, the guitar in America was nothing more than a parlor instrument for young urban ladies.

This is, as John Lydon might say, a load of bollocks. It wasn’t only a ladies’ instrument, it wasn’t only a parlor instrument, and even when it was a ladies’ parlor instrument, both the instrument and the parlor were much more complex and interesting than they’ve been made to appear.

The 19th century was, in fact, a fascinating time for the guitar in America, and while many a music writer has blandly described the 19th-century guitar as a small, quiet, dull instrument that didn’t find its voice or place in the global spotlight until the technical improvements that attended it in the 20th century, the opposite may be true – that in certain crucial respects, the 19th century was the guitar’s last hurrah.

Let’s start with one largely unacknowledged respect in which the “parlor instrument for young urban ladies” insult is completely out of whack: it’s an Anglocentric point of view. The colonists arriving from the British Isles weren’t the best guitarists in the New World. They also weren’t the most numerous, or even the first. The first identifiable guitarist in the New World was Spanish.

His name was Juan Garcia y Talvarea, and he was part of the garrison in St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied settlement on the land we now call the U.S., located on Florida’s northern coast. We don’t know anything about him except that he died circa 1576, and among the possessions he left behind was a guitar.

What did Juan Garcia y Talvarea’s guitar look like? It’s hard to know for sure, because not a single example of the 16th-century guitar has survived, and chances are that different makers made different variants: there has never been such a thing as a standard guitar. It was almost certainly a figure-eight-shaped instrument with four courses (pairs) of strings, and very small by today’s standards, perhaps 1/3 the size of a modern classical guitar, with as few as seven frets up the neck. And frets were not yet made of metal wire, but short pieces of gut string tied around the neck, like on a lute. The guitar might have been tuned in the old Spanish tuning of F below middle C, middle C, E and A or the newer tuning, with the F tuned up to a G, but any tuning would have been approximate, as there was no way of establishing perfect pitch, especially in a military encampment in the New World.

Y Talvarea probably played the same repertoire the folk guitar still plays – ballads, love songs, comic songs, complaints – though if he was among the musicians who played for Aviles on ceremonial occasions, he might have taken part in more complex instrumental works involving counterpoint. He probably also strummed dance music, perhaps playing with the harpist, for we hear elsewhere that the Spanish soldiers took guitars and harps with them as folk instruments. The garrison at St. Augustine must have needed all the social energizing it could get, being 3,000 miles from home.

Florida, after periods of belonging to the British and the French, remained Spanish until 1821, and it seems to have enjoyed the typically festive Spanish-style open-air use of the guitar. History describes the scene during a carnival early in the 19th century, “Masques, dominoes, harlequins, Punchinellos, and a great variety of grotesque disguises, on horseback, in cars, gigs and on foot, paraded the streets with guitars, violins and other instruments; and in the evenings, the houses were open to receive masks, and balls were given in every direction.” At the end of a day of festivities to celebrate the coronation of Charles IV as king of Spain, a formal minuet was held, “But as the evening grew cooler and spirits gayer, the violin was replaced by the guitar and livelier contredances occupied the floor…”

This guitar-driven dance is much more Spanish than British. In Anglophone America, the British colonists seem to have used the guitar in small domestic settings and in concert, rather than in larger social settings and in social rituals such as weddings and religious services. To overstate the case, to Anglo-Americans the guitar was an instrument rather than a way of life.

Florida, though, gives only a hint of the richness and breadth of the guitar’s flourishing in the Spanish New World. The Southwest was settled by Spanish moving up from Mexico, and the guitar was so much part of their lives that even before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, guitar strings could be bought on the Camino Real between Mexico City and Santa Fe.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the guitar moved northward into the upper reaches of Mexico – in other words, into the land we now call New Mexico, Texas, Baja California, and Arizona. It was used for dances and social ceremonies; it was even used by priests in missions that were too remote to have an organ. Indians picked it up with notable speed and skill.

Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, and declared Alta (Upper) California a province of Mexico. Between then and 1848, Spanish Californian life flourished in what is often regarded as a Golden Age. Noted 19th-century California shipbuilder William Heath Davis wrote, “Many of the women played the guitar skillfully, and the young men the violin. In almost every family there were one or more musicians, and everywhere, music was a familiar sound.

“Throughout California, feast days, rodeos, weddings, funerals, and other special occasions were accented by music, and events were preceded or followed by a fandango or a baile.”

The guitar was, as in many Hispanic cultures, an indispensable feature of life for men and women of every class. In rural areas it might be a folk instrument, but elsewhere it might equally be played in the classical tradition to the highest levels of accomplishment.

Most of the printed music (and probably some of the instruments) used by the more trained musicians would have come up from Mexico City, but Mexico was by no means a cultural desert. The musicologist John Koegel writes that more than 1,000 symphonies, sextets, string quartets and trios, mixed quartets, duets, sonatas, concertos, serenades, individual pieces for different instruments (especially guitar, cello, piano, flute, and violin), and vocal music selections have been found in a Mexico City collection dating to 1801, including not only Spanish and Mexican works, but works by major European composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Stamitz, Gossec, Pleyel, Dittersdorf, Dussek, Hoffmeister, Abel, Johann Christian Bach, Pergolesi, Boccherini, Gretry, Devienne, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Clementi, and Lolli.

It wasn’t only music that was available. Booksellers, Koegel writes, sold all sorts of musical goods in colonial Mexico. One shop’s inventory consisted of 111 violins, six flutes, two oboes, four horns, one German clave horgano, one small organ, two barrel organs, two dulsainas biejas, and a number of stringed instruments, including all kinds of forgotten and surviving members of the guitar family. Mexico City was the music capital of the New World.

Everything was changed by the 1848 Gold Rush and the influx of 100,000 Anglo-Americans that accompanied and followed it.

At first, many of the Anglo Easterners visiting California write about seeing Spanish culture for the first time, and their reactions are fascinating. There’s a marked difference between the rough-and-ready appearance and behavior of the miners, and the civilized demeanor of the Spanish:

“Among the fresh arrivals at the diggings the native Californians have begun to appear in tolerable numbers,” wrote Edwin Bryant. “Many of these people have brought their wives, who are attended usually by Indian girls. The graceful Spanish costume of the newcomers adds quite a feature to the busy scene around. There, working amidst the sallow Yankees, with their wide white trousers and straw hats, and the half-naked Indian, may be seen the native-born Californian, with his dusky visage and lustrous black eye, clad in the universal short tight jacket with its lace adornments, and velvet breeches, with a silk sash fastened round his waist, splashing away with his gay deerskin botas in the mudded water.

“Since these arrivals, almost every evening a fandango is got up on the green, before some of the tents… It is quite a treat, after a hard day’s work, to go at nightfall to one of these fandangos. The merry notes of the guitar and the violin announce them to all comers; and a motley enough looking crowd, every member of which is puffing away at a cigar, forms an applauding circle round the dancers, who smoke like the rest. One cannot help being struck by the picturesque costumes and graceful motions of the performers, who appear to dance not only with their legs, but with all their hearts and souls. Lacosse is a particular admirer of these fandangos, and he very frequently takes a part in them himself. During the interval between the dances, coffee is consumed by the senoras, and coffee with something stronger by the senors; so that, as the night advances, the merriment gets, if not ‘fast and furious,’ at least animated and imposing.”

Many of the new arrivals were struck by the democratic spirit of the dances. “It was not uncommon or surprising to see the most elaborately dressed and aristocratic woman at the ball dancing with a peon dressed only in his shirt and trousers open from the hip down, with wide and full drawers underneath, and frequently barefoot,” wrote trader Josiah Webb in 1844.

Above all, there are signs that this is a musically developed and sophisticated culture, with a wide range of music played well. This is San Francisco in 1850:
“[A] quintette of Mexican musicians… came here at night to perform. There were two harps, one large and the other very small, two guitars, and one flute. The musicians were dressed in the Mexican costume (which, however, was nothing very noticeable at that time, as many of their auditors were in the same style of dress), and were quiet, modest looking men, with contented, amiable faces. They used to walk in among the throng of people, along to the upper end of the room, take their seats, and with scarcely any preamble or discussion, commence their instrumentation. They had played so much together, and were so similar, seemingly, in disposition – calm, confident and happy – that their 10 hands moved as if guided by one mind; rising and falling in perfect unison – the harmony so sweet, and just strange enough in its tones, from the novelty in the selection of instruments, to give it a peculiar fascination for ears always accustomed to the orthodox and time-honored vehicles of music used in quintette instrumentation.”

The flood of Anglos and the steady change from a settled agraian society to a pell-mell frontier society threw off the established social and musical rhythms. The Californian Spanish were pushed into progressively poorer and more isolated areas. In town, these would become barrios; in the country, villages like Las Uvas, which turn-of-the-century writer Mary Austin, noted for her writings on the area, describes in The Land of Little Rain.

“At Las Uvas, they keep up all the good customs brought out of Old Mexico or bred in a lotus-eating land; drink, and are merry and look out for something to eat afterward; have children, nine or 10 to a family, have cockfights, keep the siesta, smoke cigarettes, and wait for the sun to go down. And always they dance; at dusk on the smooth adobe floors, afternoons under the trellises where the earth is damp and has a fruity smell. A betrothal, a wedding, or a christening, or the mere proximity of a guitar is sufficient occasion; and if the occasion lacks, send for the guitar and dance anyway.”

For every sympathetic Mary Austin, though, there’s a William Heath Davis, ready to look down his nose.

“The families of the wealthier classes had more or less education,” he wrote. “Their contact with the foreign population was an advantage to them in this respect. There were no established schools outside the Missions, and what little education the young people obtained, they picked up in the family, learning to read and write among themselves. They seemed to have a talent and taste for music. Many of the women played the guitar skillfully, and the young men the violin. Of course, they had no scientific and technical musical instruction.”

It’s that last sentence that reeks of the smug snobbery of the Victorian Easterner. It’s hardly surprising, then, to read that as soon as the newcomers reach a critical mass, the guitar is pushed aside by the instrument that best embodied “scientific and technical” music: “On our return, we stopped at Don José’s house in town to lunch, where we were most hospitably entertained,” wrote the Rev. William Ingraham Kip. “His daughter played some pieces on the piano for us, with great taste and skill. As American habits creep in, this instrument is, in many California houses, taking the place of the guitar, whose music they inherited from their Spanish ancestors.”

What we’re seeing is a form of low-level cultural genocide, in which the guitar is a kind of metaphor: so many features of Spanish California life that delighted the new arrivals would be rudely elbowed aside, spoken of with disdain, and marginalized.

The remnants of Old Spanish culture became increasingly marginal, but not extinct, and they were “rediscovered” before the end of the century by Charles F. Lummis, a writer, folk song collector and guitarist, who crossed the country on foot from Massachusetts in the mid 1880s. He wrote that life in California “before the gringo” had been “the happiest, the humanest, the most beautiful life that Caucasians have ever lived anywhere under the sun.” He collected songs in the high desert of what is now New Mexico, “squatting with the quiet Mexican herders in the little semi-circular brush shelter by a crackling fire of juniper,” hearing “an invariable sense of time and rhythm which only our best musicians can match. And they were such human, friendly folk! Glad to sing a song over and over until I had it note-perfect, and then to repeat the words while I wrote them down… So we sang and talked and smoked cigarettes under the infinite stars of a New Mexican sky or the even more numerous flakes of a mountain snowstorm.”

The French had also brought guitars to the New World. The Rev. J.W. Adams of Syracuse references crossing the St. Lawrence River and moving down from present-day Canada with a guitar, bound for a Jesuit colony founded in 1655 at Onadaga. The colony prospered, the account says, for nearly two years until, “At length, a conspiracy which extended itself through the Iroquois cantons was formed against them.” Sieur Dupuys, an officer who had brought the mission from Quebec, decided to retreat to Canada, the Rev. Adams writes, but the settlers needed to build canoes and make their escape without arousing the suspicions of the Iroquois, “And this they accomplished by a stratagem singular enough.”

“Singular enough” sums the story up pretty well. In the midst of various flummery involving prophetic dreams, family obligations and whatnot, the French invite all the Indians to a feast, and while they’re eating, the settlers secretly load up their bateaux, ready for a swift departure. A young Frenchman then produces a guitar and begins playing to the Indians. It must have been an early New Age piece in DADGAD tuning, because “In less than quarter of an hour every Indian was laid soundly to sleep. The young Frenchman immediately sallied forth to join his companions, who were ready at the instant to push from the shore.”

As if this weren’t unlikely enough, the Indians wake up the following morning and spend all day wondering why all the French houses are shut and locked. Eventually, at eveningfall, they break in and “to their utter astonishment found every house empty.”

This story is preposterous in so many respects it’s hard to have much confidence in it – but for the fact that the guitar was all the rage in France at that time. Before his death in 1643, Louis XIII was such a keen player that the guitar was used in chamber recitals and ballets at court. One painting/engraving shows a procession of guitarists walking onstage, two abreast, to perform during a ballet – and one of the musicians is thought to be the King himself. The young Louis XIV was taught by the great Italian guitarist Francisco Corbetta, and became as avid a player as his father. In fact, Voltaire observed caustically that the only things Louis ever learned were to dance and play the guitar, and it has been suggested that Corbetta had been invited by Cardinal Mazarin so that young Louis would become so addicted to the guitar that he would never become interested in politics, and leave the running of the country to Mazarin.

The Guitar as Political Tool
In the New World, the French established a series of settlements from Detroit (1701) down river to New Orleans (1718) and Baton Rouge (1720), as well as Biloxi (1699) and Mobile (1711) on the Gulf of Mexico. Individual settlements in 19th-century America were often almost entirely inhabited by one nationality, so it’s not surprising that when G.W. Featherstonhaugh, exploring the upper Midwest before mid-century, should talk of visiting “French” villages. He wrote:

“It was 3 p.m. before I reached St. Geneviève, and upon returning to my old quarters, I found that both the master and mistress of the house had gone on a visit to Kaskaskias, an old French settlement in Illinois, but had left word that I was to consider myself at home… Having further refreshed myself with a comfortable cup of tea, I strolled out into the village.

“How different the tranquil existence of this primitive French village from the busy excitement of a populous city! At 9 p.m. there was not a soul to be met in the streets; here and there the chords of a guitar, accompanied by a French voice, agreeably interrupted the general silence, whilst the only tread that was audible was that of cows slowly moving up and down the streets…”

So this was the guitar in much of America in the first half of the 19th century: played by men and women, rich and poor, indoors and out, alone or in company.

And if someone were singing to the guitar, they might have been singing in English, French, German, Italian (though that would have been more likely after the great Italian immigrations of the 1880s and later), or Portuguese (though that would have been more likely in the whaling towns of New England and the cannery towns of California, as Portuguese from the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands were highly prized seamen). Most likely, though, it was Spanish, and it’s one of the great tragedies in the history of the guitar that the Spanish-American guitar tradition withered and died almost without trace.

Read Part Two: Man and Machine and Part Three: Women.

Tim Brookes is a guitarist and the author of Guitar: An American Life, published by Grove Atlantic Press. The book tells two stories: the history of the guitar on the North American continent and the history of one custom guitar being built from scratch by master luthier Rick Davis in Vermont.

This article originally appeared in VG Jul. 2005 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.