Dave Hunter 08.25.2009
We might usually think of the true “legendary guitar” as being an electric played by a rock god, or perhaps a flat-top acoustic that helped to establish the folk-rock boom. But one archaic archtop—an instrument not wielded by a jazz star, even—has arguably seen more American musical history in the making than any other single guitar the world over. In 1927, country music originators The Carter Family made their first recordings (the now famous “Bristol Sessions” recorded in Bristol, TN) and started tasting success, and one year later their singer and guitarist Maybelle Carter used a little of those earnings to buy herself a brand new Gibson L-5 archtop acoustic guitar. Carter’s L-5 would be used throughout The Carter Family’s recorded catalogue of more than 300 songs, as well as her tenure as “Mother” Maybelle Carter with her daughters Anita, Helen, and June, and would serve to lay the foundations of country, bluegrass, and American folk music—earning Carter the title of “Queen Mother of Country Music” in the process. But in 1928 she was just a girl of 19 with a new guitar, and boy how she loved to play it.
Gibson’s L-5 debuted in 1922 as part of designer Lloyd Loar’s Master Series of instruments. It represented some of the most significant advancements ever brought to the archtop acoustic guitar, and, although it didn’t retain quite the seminal status that its sibling the F-5 mandolin enjoys to this day, it did lay the groundwork for the great Gibson archtops of the ’30s. Maybelle Carter’s 1928 L-5, made just four years after Loar left Gibson in 1924, was a fairly austere instrument by the standards of later archtops, with simple dot inlays on the fingerboard, unbound f-holes, and a basic three-ply binding around its carved solid-spruce top, but it did sport a very resonant, lively construction, and innovations such as an adjustable bridge and an adjustable truss rod (both firsts for the archtop guitar when Gibson brought them to the L-5 later in 1922).
Today we might think of these archtops as archetypal “jazz boxes”, but in the early to mid ’20s the guitar was still a minority player in the jazz world, with the tenor banjo making the bigger noise up on the bandstand. Some groundbreaking jazz artists, Eddie Lang for one, did take up the L-5, but it was just as likely to be seen in the hands of players on the burgeoning country scene of the day, in an era when the flat-top acoustic had yet to establish its primacy in that genre.
F-hole-laden arched top aside, Maybelle Carter established a playing style that echoes forth on countless flat-top dreadnoughts even today. Maybelle’s style, dubbed the “Carter scratch”, was a form of fingerstyle playing that involved thumbing the bass note while her fingers picked a sort of hybrid lead and rhythm on the higher strings. Although it sounds rather simple on first listen, Carter’s playing often packs a lot of nuance and driving rhythmic subtlety, and is a clear precursor to many other great country playing styles to come, from Merle Travis’s “Travis picking” to Chet Atkins’s own fingerstyle. Listen to any of The Carter Family’s legendary songs—“May the Circle Be Unbroken”, “Wildwood Flower”, or “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow Tree”—and you hear how confidently Carter’s playing propels both the melody and the rhythmic motion of the song.
In 1934 the L-5’s body was “advanced” to 17" wide, and its look was enhanced by five-ply fingerboard and peghead binding and other elements. Later that same year, Gibson introduced the 18"-wide Super 400, a guitar that would become “king of the archtops”, although the L-5 endured until 1958 in its non-cutaway form, and until 1982 as the L-5C with cutaway. Maybelle Carter died in 1978, but her legacy has endured beyond her own life and beyond the run of the L-5: her music, and the playing style that drove it, continues to inspire listeners, and her bloodline reached far into the heart of popular country music via her daughter June Carter, and June’s husband Johnny Cash.
And as for that 1928 L-5 itself? Maybelle Carter’s original Gibson L-5 was purchased in August of 2004 from Gruhn Guitars of Nashville, Tenn. for $575,000, on behalf of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
Photos Courtesy of Gruhn Guitars.
No comments:
Post a Comment