[Dixielandjazz] Electric guitar (was Dixielandjazz Digest, Vol 56, Issue 2)

[Larry Walton Entertainment - St. Louis]

I owned an early electric guitar.  The pickup was a steel bar that went 
entirely around the strings and had a huge coil of wire around it (inside 
the guitar)  it was an arch top.  It was the first one I didn't learn to 
play.

One of the instrument dealers here sold his music store and goes around the 
country in his huge mobile home/camper and hits the pawn shops in various 
cities.  In this way he gets his travel and expenses written off his taxes. 
He also owns an importing/exporting company.  He looks for high quality or 
rare instruments.  He exports old Gibson's and Fenders to Japan where they 
will pay enormous prices for vintage guitars.  I have been told that some 
models can bring $50,000 or more and a Mark VI Selmer can bring huge prices 
too as compared to here.  I suspect that he has a lot of this money stored 
in off shore accounts.

A lot of the pawn shop owners don't know what they have.  He also watches 
the newspapers and flea markets for vintage instruments.   He picks 
instruments up for almost nothing.  I got my Selmer G10 clarinet from him 
for $800 and I suspect he gave $50 or so for it.
Larry
St. Louis
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Haesler" <bhaesler at bigpond.net.au>
To: "Larry Walton Entertainment - St. Louis" <larrys.bands at charter.net>
Cc: "Dixieland Jazz Mailing List" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 7:46 PM
Subject: Re: Electric guitar (was Dixielandjazz Digest, Vol 56, Issue 2)


> Larry Walton wrote:
>> Wasn't the electric pickup invented by Les Paul sometime in the late 30's 
>> or early 40's.  I didn't think that they were even available until after 
>> the war sometime.  I suppose they could have miked them before that but I 
>> didn't think it was possible to own an electric guitar before the war.
>
> Dear Larry,
> The credit for amplifying the guitar for big band performances is usually 
> given to Eddie Durham, trombonist/guitarist with the Bennie Moten Kansas 
> City Orchestra who, in about 1929, fitted a microphone to his guitar and 
> wired it to an amplifier.
> He can be heard soloing with it on the Moten's Dec 1932 recordings of 
> "Toby" and "Moten Swing". He can also be heard on Jimmy Lunceford's 
> "Hittin' The Bottle" from Sept 1935. Other guitarists followed. However it 
> was the Gibson guitar company which developed the electric guitar from the 
> mid 1930s. But it was Charlie Christian (influenced by Durham) with the 
> Goodman orch who really demonstrated on record what it was all about.
> All you need to know about the development of the electric guitar from the 
> 1920s onward can be found  at:
>   http://www.angelfire.com/music2/myguitar
> from which the following has been extracted.
>
> A Brief History of the Electric Guitar by Jeff Maguire.
>     Probably the first man to build and market an electric "Spanish" style 
> guitar was Lloyd Loar. Loar was an accoustical engineer for Gibson, and 
> legendary for his contributions to the design and development of the 
> mandolin. Loar had also been experimenting with the electrical 
> amplification of the guitar since the early 1920's, and in 1933 created a 
> new company Vivi-Tone as an independent subdivision of Gibson. Vivi-Tone 
> was dedicated to the production of one thing, Spanish style electric 
> guitars.
>    Vivi-Tone aggressively marketed the electric Spanish guitar but with 
> little succes. The design was poor, and there was not yet a sufficient 
> market to sustain a small company whose only product was a Spanish style 
> electric guitar. Within a year Vivi-Tone failed, but the internal seeds 
> had been planted at Gibson, the electric Spanish was the future of the 
> guitar and the failed Vivi-Tone would go on to inspire Gibson to create 
> the electric guitar that would revolutionize the instrument, the ES-150.
>    In 1935 Gibson commissioned Alvino Rey, a prominant slide guitarist of 
> the era to assist in the development of a new guitar pickup. The prototype 
> was developed by Rey, in conjunction with enginners at the Lyon & Healy 
> company of Chicago and the final version was built by Gibson employee 
> Walter Fuller. The pickup was initially incorporated on a lap steel model 
> in late 1935, but shortly thereafter was introduced onto a standard f-hole 
> archtop guitar and designated the ES-150, ( ES for Electro Spanish, 150 
> the price in dollars ). The first one was shipped from Kalamazoo Michigan 
> on May 20,1936. The first modern electric guitar had been born, guitar 
> history was being made.
>    The ES-150 became an instant success, guitar players from all over the 
> country and from every style flocked to purchase one, most noteable among 
> them was Charlie Christian who took advantage of the increased volume of 
> the instrument and began to use the guitar as a Jazz soloist in the same 
> way that only a horn player previously could have. His performances with 
> the Benny Goodman Orchestra ultimately revolutionized the way all 
> musicians thought about the guitar. To this day the ES-150 is known as the 
> "Charlie Christian" model.
>
> Kind regards,
> Bill.
>
>