Back to top

Click on picture for demo

The USA in the mid 19th century was a  melting pot of cultures, races, skills and tastes. Not only that, but as the century turned, it was a land of optimism, curiosity, and  lack of wars and tension with other lands and peoples. In a way, therefore, it was ready to embrace music from other cultures.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that immigrant musical instrument makers, as well as entrepreneurs,  found a good market for their skills and ideas. Not only that but – as music-making became more widespread and less class-bound - the instruments needed to be much more versatile, approachable, affordable  and LOUD.

In the first decade of the 20th century several important technological developments led to an unprecedented spread in the demand for music and musical instruments. One of these was the invention of the phonograph (the Victor Talking Machine Co. was established in 1902). In conjunction with this came a boom in the music writing and publication industry (“Tin Pan Alley” acquired its nickname in 1903). The mass-production of an affordable motor car brought a new mobility to the masses, and the moving picture houses brought stardom, romance, fun and music much nearer to the starstruck public.

Shortly afterwards – in the mid ‘twenties - hundreds of new radio stations received licences to broadcast, and many of them brought live music of all kinds into everyone’s living rooms.

Much of the popular interest in self-made music was kick-started by one particular event back in January 1880 in New York: a concert performed by the visiting Figaro Spanish Students. Most of them played the Spanish bandurria – essentially a Spanish adaptation of the mandolin. What struck the American public about this troupe was their incredible musicianship, but lack of written music, conductor or apparent direction. Despite a stunningly-performed repertoire including Mozart and Beethoven, many of them could not actually read music – a fact which didn’t take long to be revealed in the New York press and beyond.

The first effect of this event (and subsequent concerts) was to arouse an interest in the mandolin – a fact which a certain Orville Gibson was quick to capitalise on. Another more general one was the belief that anyone could make music – especially with the encouragement, fun and anonymity offered by forming groups and clubs. So began a massive popular craze to form small community bands, choirs and orchestras: driven later by the availability of recordings, shows, and sheet music, and the ingenious efforts of musical instrument manufacturers.

The instruments had to be portable, and it was inevitable that the mandolin became the instrument of choice in the early days. Having said that, the banjo was still fairly popular – having been around for nearly a century, and associated with minstrel and vaudeville music.

But the guitar was also very much around, and soon became adopted – and eventually gained ascendancy - as a much more versatile and powerful instrument than either the banjo or the mandolin.

This became even more apparent when blues and jazz were heard and published for the first time in the early 1920s.

In addition to this, the popularity of jazz-influenced dance bands put a huge pressure on the professional band guitarist: the bands were getting bigger and louder, and the music (and the audiences) more raucous. Yet at the same time, the guitarist was expected to follow the new craze of slipping a solo (often Hawaiian-sounding, by popular demand) into the middle of a song.

And so – at the same time that guitars were being adapted or redesigned to accommodate the Hawaiian style – there was an equal demand for guitars that could simply be heard above the racket!

The trouble was – they just weren’t loud enough! The extension of the sound chamber up into the neck was a great idea, but – set against the lightness of the wood and the fact that the instrument lay on the player’s lap, pointing upwards rather than forwards – the sound advantages were just cancelled out, and they were actually no louder that a conventional guitar.

The other problem was that it wasn’t just Hawaiian music that made new demands on the rather dated guitar. True – the Hawaiian style of playing (slid notes on often a single string) was much admired and copied. But its importance went way beyond that: it was suddenly attractive to play solos and tunes on the guitar – Hawaiian or otherwise.

This fact is just so important – it dictated the style of music played on guitars in the fields of blues, country, Hawaiian, folk, jazz, vaudeville and even classical music for ever

Herman Weissenborn arrived from Germany in 1902, and, by 1910, had settled in Los Angeles as a guitar,  piano and violin repairer and builder. Some time in 1920, he built his first special Hawaiian style guitar, and immediately hit upon a winner (although another maker – Chris Knutsen – produced something very similar at around the same time).

These were very peculiar-looking instruments: the bodies were very shallow (so as not to slide off your lap) and the body chamber extended right up to the head, making a continuous huge box of a sound-chamber incorporating a great hollow square neck. Decoration tended to be fairly minimal (as you couldn’t see it from the audience!), and they were generally made – in the true Hawaiian tradition – from lightweight koa wood.

A whole range of such guitars were made – alongside the converted conventional guitars – from 1920 up to the mid-1930s. Many manufacturers put their name to them, but it is believed that a large number of them were made or designed by Weissenborn himself. With the recent upsurge in interest for “resonator” guitars (much more about these later), there’s now a good market for these weird instruments – both originals (which are extremely rare) and modern replicas.

By 1920 the Hawaiian craze had swept America. That – coupled with the increasing popularity of guitars, mandolins and banjos (thanks to Gibson’s extraordinary marketing techniques, as well as Lyon and Healy’s huge and attractively-priced output, and Martin’s pursuit of pure quality) brought the guitar to the forefront of the Americans’ musical consciousness and aspirations. Everyone wanted to play, and many of them wanted to play like the Hawaiians.

The big names in guitar manufacture weren’t slow to respond to the demand. Both Martin and Gibson brought out specially-built Hawaiian versions of their acoustic range: Gibson sold “Hawaiian equipment” to convert their guitars in 1917 (raised nut, flat frets, steel bar and finger-picks), and Martin, in the early 1920s, were offering their basic range in Hawaiian versions (including heavier internal bracing to strengthen the body, allowing it to take the thicker steel strings). To this day, some Gibsons have the model prefix “ES” for “Electric Spanish”, used originally to differentiate them from the Hawaiian versions.

But there were one or two canny guitar-builders who realised that – once you didn’t have to conform to the conventions of accurate frets, narrow necks and bendy thin strings, you could totally rethink the design of the guitar.

By the spookiest of chances: many years later I was at a singaround session in a little pub in the backwoods of East Suffolk. One of the performers was an obvious regular – an elderly white-haired (but very glamorous) lady, whose name was Mimi or Mitzi or something. She played the electric Hawaiian steel guitar, and I strummed a few chords along with her. At the end, she came over and said how nice it was to have someone accompany her. I said how much I loved that kind of music, and she was tickled that someone so young (all things are relative!) would know about that old stuff. I said I had an old record of Felix Mendelssohn’s Hawaiian Serenaders, and she said “well, that was my band”. Turned out she was actually their lead Hawaiian guitarist!

Anyway – back to The States early in the 20th Century, and the Hawaiian music boom.

The Hawaiian sliding style of playing the guitar initiated a rethink of how the guitar had to look and be played.

You remember I banged on about the four  basic guitar attributes: tone, volume, accuracy and playability. Well, the slide style sort of turned this on its head. Because the notes were made (usually playing one string at a time) by resting a steel slide of some description on the strings, you no longer needed to be able to press the strings down with the fingers of your left hand (if you’re right-handed, that is). This meant that the strings didn’t need to be close to the fingerboard: indeed, it was discovered that the sound was actually better (and you didn’t rattle the slide on the frets) if you raised the strings up away from the frets. They could also be thicker, and consequently louder.

Once you accept this premise, it then becomes apparent that you can overcome that age-old problem of not being able to see what you’re doing, by turning the guitar up to face you, as you no longer need to “grip” your hand around the neck, to help press your fingers on the frets.

The old accuracy thing is also less relevant: although the frets and position dots help to see where you are (and, of course, with the fingerboard facing up, you can see this so much better now), you can make adjustments if you don’t quite get the right note, by sliding the note up or down a bit more – if anything, this adds to the effect. (I always reckon that violin players can get away with this: if they don’t hit the fingerboard in quite the right place, they can add a bit of vibrato or wobble the note around a bit, until they get it dead on, without the listener being any the wiser).

So we now have a new requirement for the good old guitar (which hadn’t really changed much for about 150 years): the strings could be raised up from the fingerboard (and could be a damned sight thicker); the neck didn’t need to be so slim and curved (as the hand didn’t need to go round it), and the body needed to make the sound louder, so that the single notes could be heard above the strumming.

There’s an awfullot of stuff on this page, so it might take a while to load fully. Please hang on in there - it’s worth it!