[chas52]

Originally Posted by Wade Hampton

Chas, from what I can tell American acoustic baritone guitars evolved from the electric baritones. The first time I became aware of them was when I bought a copy of the Danny Ferrington guitar book - he had at least a couple of acoustic baritones that he'd built for famous musicians in there.

When I ordered my first baritone from Roy McAlister I hadn't laid my hands on an acoustic one, just a couple of electrics. So it was a leap of faith on my part, but I wasn't relying on blind faith alone: Roy had already designed and built the prototypes for the Santa Cruz Bob Brozman signature model baritone guitar. So Roy had already worked within the field of acoustic baritone guitar design when he took on my project (which gave him an outlet for the other ideas he'd had for the instrument when developing the Brozman model.)

Anyway, the Santa Cruz Brozman model came on the market in, I don't know, 1997 or thereabouts, and I received my McAlister baritone in 1999. I assume the Ferrington baritones were built in the 1980's.

So, short version: in terms of American acoustic baritone guitars, the lineage is pretty simple - first came the electrics, then the acoustic versions evolved from those. While it's true that the Mexican bajo sexto is a baritone instrument and is much, much older than either the electric or acoustic baritone guitar, there's neither much similarity or a direct lineage between them. At most the bajo sexto might have given the Fender company the idea to tinker around with the idea of a longer-scaled, lower-pitched instrument.

Hope that makes sense.


Wade Hampton Miller

thank you so much for another super great reply to one of my questions Wade. you make this a really fun forum!

Originally Posted by Doug Young

Martin Simpson played a Bown Baritone on Leaves of Life, which was 1990 or so?

Here's a link to a classicial builder with some interesting mid-80's info:

http://www.caldersmithguitars.com/gtr.php

I assume you did a basic google search and at least found the wikipedia entry?

thank you to Doug for another excellent reply to my question. I did google and read the wikipedia entry. it did not mention acoustic bari's at all. thanks for the link to the caldersmith website.

Originally Posted by Rick Turner

When I worked at Westwood Music, I was doing baritone conversions in 1989 by taking whatever guitars clients would bring me and re-topping them and putting on new 27" scale fingerboards. The first was for a guy named Tim Ray, the second was for Jackson Browne, then Bernie Leadon, Stephen Bishop, and a couple more. They had absolutely nothing to do with electric baritones.

However, the real antecedents would be Stella 12 strings as per Leadbelly and Mexican bajo sextos. Once again, this has nothing to do with electric guitars or six string basses.

hey Rick, thank you. I am so interested to hear about these guys who were into bari's. Leadon was an Eagles guy it seems to me. had a beautiful song called "My Man". I was just reading about it the other day. I think I read that he wrote it about gram parsons??? I'll have to check.
and I just saw a funny clip on youtube: jackson browne is talking about his friend bruce cockburn (I wonder if he plays an acoustic bari; I know he plays some low tuned guitar, maybe an electric). he heard bruce play with all these effects. and he thought yeah, thats how bruce gets his sound. and then he heard bruce play again a year later with no effects at all. and jackson realized that the magic is in bruce, not the effects.