Gee's Gear 

These days, everything in our world exists as a “Brand,” a quantifiable product or service, a known commodity.  Marketing is the essence of successful market share, and thus it is natural that those things we purchase or consume exist for us in a world of their own mythology, complete with fan clubs, spokespeople and pedigrees.  Say the magic words: Gibson, Fender, Martin, Guild, Gretsch, Rickenbacker, and guitarists everywhere can picture their favorite models, the artists who play them, and on what great recordings they appear.

It wasn’t always so.

In 1930’s America, during the Great Depression, the makers of our cherished musical instruments teetered on the verge of their own economic         collapse.  At that time, there were no Big Box musical instrument retailers.  Instead, instruments were     typically sold in one of three ways: through stand alone Mom and Pop music shops, in regional or     national department store chains, or through the famed catalog retailers like Sears, Spiegel and Montgomery Ward.  Of them, the Mom and Pop shops were the most important, because the           relationships formed between the customer and the shop were such that they were the best source of   repeat business.

So, it was vital to protect those stores and keep them viable.  Gibson, which sold most of its instruments through those small retail shops, was contractually obliged to them to not undercut the Mom and Pops by wholesaling their guitars at lower rates to the   department stores and catalog giants.  This left Gibson between a rock and a hard place.  At a time when most consumers had little to no disposable   income, it was essential to find a way to get more   affordable instruments to market, get what could be gotten out of their sale, and keep the lights on at the factory.

Gibson, Harmony and Kay guitars, probably the three biggest manufacturers by volume, kept those lights on by manufacturing instruments under a slew of different names, and distributed them through all of the various outlets.  We know of quite a few of them: Kalamazoo, Recording King, Cromwell, Kel Kroydon, Silvertone, Airline, Alden, Oahu.  Gibson alone       manufactured instruments under a little over thirty different brand names, and Harmony somewhere between fifty and sixty.  Many of these instruments found their homes in the catalog companies, where those unusual brand names allowed for them to be sold as “House instruments,” guitars you could get through that store and no where else.

To make this all work, it was often the case that the off-brand instruments had to be simplified in       construction, ornamentation and design, so they could be made more efficiently and therefore be less costly to produce to the manufacturing       company.  They also had to look different enough that a knowledgeable consumer would not readily see that this was a Gibson masquerading as     something else.  As an example, in Gibson acoustic guitars manufactured for the catalog and               department store markets, X-Bracing gave way to ladder bracing, fancy inlays were simplified, the patented Gibson Truss Rod system was sidelined, and headstocks took on new shapes.  Body shapes generally stayed the same, finishing techniques stayed the same, tone woods were less figured.  In the end, a guitar is a guitar; these just looked and sounded a little different.

This past month, we took in a strikingly beautiful acoustic flat top with an arched back, floating bridge and trapeze tailpiece.  It had no serial       number, no FON number, and no brand name on the headstock. But, in design and appointments, it was clearly a guitar from the 1930s.  The question           became, “Whose guitar was it?”

We wound up looking at four distinct features of the guitar to try to make a determination on its         provenance: the width of the lower bout, the unusual checkerboard design of the sound hole trim, the neck profile and the shape of the headstock.  After many hours of painstaking research, we did not turn up a single example of a guitar that was entirely like this one.  There was a Kay guitar that looked       something like this from a distance, but all of the four parameters were different.

Still, what we had on the bench held enough clues to sort it out.  The lower bout, at 15 5/8” wide, is the same size as a 1930’s Gibson dreadnought (and of a Martin, to be precise), while the aforementioned Kay had a lower bout of 15 7/8”.  The neck profile is a classic V profile, common to Gibson guitars, and the binding at the sound hole, often referred to as a “zipper” binding, was found, as far as we can tell, on Gibson guitars, for only one year, 1932.

That left the headstock.  while a number of           manufacturers used paddle style headstocks   somewhat similar to this, the only ones we could find that were exact matches for the one on our guitar, with rounded corners and a chamfered front to back edge, were on some of the Kalamazoo models, a number of the Recording Kings, and on the lesser known Cromwell and Capital guitars.  All were made by Gibson.

What we have, we are fairly certain, is a Gibson made Acoustic Flat Top from 1932 (or 1933 with       leftover parts!).  It is ladder braced (we had to reglue two of the braces) has a 26” scale, and plays like a dream.  It has a voice that is among the loudest I have ever heard on an acoustic guitar, with a crisp snap of an attack and a resonance that borders on having its own echo.

In the end, the lack of a specific brand name on the headstock probably indicates that this was a guitar made and sold as a “stencil,” an instrument       wholesaled without brand markings, so a retailer could affix, inlay or engrave their own, creating a proprietary “House Brand” in the process.

The lesson?  If you come across an old guitar that feels solidly built and sounds great, do not dismiss it for lack of a well known brand name.  Many of these older instruments were made by folks who really knew what they were about, and unique voices from a bygone era could be yours for a song.