Martin Guitar Masterpieces - Review

From One to a Million - Review by Michael Simmons

Two new books tell C.F. Martin's story and showcase his company's special editions.

Martin Guitar Masterpieces by Dick Boak

Most guitar aficionados know the basic outline of Christian Fredrick Martin's story: how he arrived in New York from Germany in 1833, set up a workshop and quickly earned a reputation for building the finest guitars in the city; how he moved to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, in 1839 and opened the small guitar factory that would later grow into one of the world's greatest guitar companies; and how he invented X-shaped top braces in the 1850s. In fact, these stories have been told and retold so many times in the 130 years since Martin's death that they have taken on a slightly unreal, almost mythical aura.

In his new book C.F. Martin and His Guitars: 1796–1873, historian Philip J. Gura retells the familiar tale with a level of detail that dispels the romantic exaggerations that have accumulated around the name of C.F. Martin over the decades. Gura was allowed unprecedented access to the Martin archives, which include ledger books dating back to the founding of the company, invoices, price lists, catalogs, and hundreds of letters to and from C. F. Martin.

Perhaps the most common misconception Gura takes on is that C. F. Martin spent his first years in America earning a living as a solitary luthier in his New York workshop. Pay ledgers reveal that as early as 1834 he was paying luthiers to help him make his guitars. Two of these men, Heinrich Schatz and Louis Schmidt, left Martin's employ to make guitars on their own. Martin was a skilled craftsman—before coming to America he spent 14 years working with the celebrated Viennese luthier Johann Stauffer—but he was also a savvy businessman. He realized that the guitar market in the 1830s was too small to support him and his growing family, so along with building guitars, he ran a successful business importing musical instruments from Europe and operated a retail music shop.

Schatz and Martin remained friendly and built instruments together through the late 1830s. Schatz left New York for rural Pennsylvania in 1836 and convinced Martin to move there in 1839. Martin quickly built a small factory, supplied it with the latest high-tech gadgetry like a steam-powered band saw, and devoted much of his time to marketing his guitars in New York, Philadelphia, and a few other cities. Martin family legend has it that C.F. Martin built guitars at his kitchen table in Nazareth, but as he already had a successful factory, this is unlikely.
Oddly, almost no documentation survives from Martin's first decade in Pennsylvania. This is particularly vexing because it was during this period that Martin started using the X-bracing pattern that made steel-string guitars viable a few decades later. Gura points out that other German guitar makers in America, including Louis Schmidt, who was building instruments with his new partner George Maul, started building cross-braced guitars around the same time Martin did. So we may never know if Martin came up with the cross-brace idea or if some now anonymous luthier thought it up.

Luckily, the records from 1849 until C.F. Martin's death in 1873 are quite complete. Gura uses them to document the unsuccessful attempts of upstart luthiers like John Ashdown and William Tilton to unseat Martin as America's premier guitar maker. Gura also reveals how Martin refused to sell guitars at a heavy discount to the Chicago distributor Lyon and Healy and how they retaliated by starting their own Washburn guitar line. The records also reveal the haphazard genesis of Martin’s numbering system. Martin had no model designations in the early days; frustrated distributors began asking for specific models as the "17-dollar model" or the "20-dollar model." After a while Martin began to designate the models by the price, and then size and price, which eventually grew into the naming system we now know.

C.F. Martin and His Guitars: 1796–1873 is copiously illustrated with color photos of some of the earliest known Martin guitars, along with many photos and drawings of musicians from the 1830s through the 1870s. In the beginning, Martin guitars were made to order. By the 1920s there were enough standardized models in production to satisfy most players. Still, every now and then Martin would respond to requests from special customers. In 1929 a popular banjo player named Perry Bechtel suggested that a longer, 14-fret neck might appeal to the scores of banjoists who were switching over to guitar. Martin dubbed the new guitar the Orchestra Model, or OM. It quickly became one of the company’s most popular styles and within a few years most Martin instruments were sporting the new 14-fret necks. In 1993 Martin launched the Artists’ Editions series of guitars with a limited release of the OM-28 Perry Bechtel, honoring the man who inspired the model.
The complete story of the OM-28 Perry Bechtel, and the other guitars in the Artists' Editions series, is engagingly told by Dick Boak in his new book Martin Guitar Masterpieces. Boak is the head of Martin’s Artist Relations department; part of his job is working with the musicians and coming up with the particular features for the guitars that will bear their names. The guitars featured in the book include re-creations of specific instruments built for artists in the past (Gene Autry's D-45, Jimmie Rodgers' 000-45, each featuring a fretboard inlaid with the artist's name), re-creations of specific models from specific years (Joan Baez' 1929 00-45, Eric Clapton's 1939 000-42, Steve Howe's 1953 00-18), and new instruments specially created for artists (Johnny Cash's black D-42JC, Marty Stuart's cowboy-theme HD-40MS).

Each entry features a color photo or two of the instrument and a short essay from Boak describing the genesis of the guitar. Along with reports about the structural and cosmetic details, Boak tells personal anecdotes about events like the numerous attempts to get a legible signature from Willie Nelson, Sting trying to score a free pair of Martin sweatpants, and the effort to come up with a new neck-joint design with Ned Steinberger. Boak also tells about the failed attempts to get Paul McCartney and Neil Young to sign on with Martin. (This last failure was particularly annoying because Martin has built limited editions for Young's former bandmates Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash.)

Martin Guitar Masterpieces also includes a section on the incredibly ornate one-off guitars Larry Robinson has inlaid for Martin, including the China Dragon D-45 (serial number 700,000), the Peacock (serial number 750,000), and a sneak peak at Robinson's soundhole "rose" and fingerboard inlay for Martin’s millionth guitar, which should be completed in 2004.

The C.F. Martin in Gura's book was a pragmatist with a visionary streak. His conservative business instincts were coupled with an innovative flair for guitar design. When he left Germany in 1833 the modern guitar had only existed for about 50 years, but he gambled that the young instrument would find a home in a young America. By the time he died in 1873 the guitar was firmly fixed in American culture, largely due to his efforts. It’s not hard to imagine him flipping through the pages of Boak's book and being equally impressed by the artistry on display and the fact that the company he founded lasted long enough to build and sell a million guitars. n

Books Reviewed:
- Philip F. Gura, C.F. Martin and his Guitars: 1796–1873, University of North Carolina Press, ISBN 0-8078-2801-7
- Dick Boak, Martin Guitar Masterpieces: A Showcase of Artists’ Editions, Limited Editions, and Custom Guitars,
ISBN 0-8212-2835-8