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Old 07-09-2014, 10:11 PM
upsidedown upsidedown is offline
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Default First pickguards?

Every now and again in an old Western (movie/TV show) there'll be a guitar during a saloon or trail scene. Usually the guitar will have a pickguard, which looks like an anachronism.

Anyone know when the first pickguards appeared?
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Old 07-09-2014, 10:41 PM
Wade Hampton Wade Hampton is offline
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Interesting question.

Most of the guitars you'll see in old cowboy movies (and modern movies set in any historical era other than the present, for that matter,) ARE anachronistic, for the simple reason that most movie directors don't care much about being accurate about that level of detail. To the extent that they think of it at all, I'm sure they think "Who's going to notice, and more importantly, who's going to care?"

So most of what you see in old Westerns is whatever the person playing the guitar in the scene happened to be using at the time.

As for when pickguards started appearing, that's an interesting question. I ran a Google image search on 19th Century Martin guitars and some instruments that were older than that, with nary a pickguard in sight.

The best educated guess I can give you is that pickguards started getting put on guitars around the same time that steel strings came into common use. There's a definite correlation between the rise of steel string acoustic guitars played with plectrums and the popularity of mandolins, both of which were common among Italian immigrants to the United States beginning around the 1880's. A lot of the early pickguards you see on guitars from around the turn of the last century were clearly inspired by mandolin pickguards, in terms of the shapes they had and also that they were inlaid into the tops, as were most mandolin pickguards back then.

There's an unspoken and unexamined assumption among many American guitarists that steel strings on acoustic guitars MUST have started in North America, since in Martin and Gibson we have two companies with 19th Century roots that between them have produced the most influential steel string acoustic guitar designs of all time.

But it was the Italians who did it first, interestingly enough, not the Americans, and because so many Italian instrument builders came in those waves of immigrants, they converted a nation that had been playing mostly gut string instruments (including banjos) to a nation that has heavily favored steel string acoustic instruments ever since.

Anyway, your gut instinct about seeing pickguards on the guitars being played in Westerns is correct: they might have existed here and there, but they wouldn't have been at all common back then.

Hope that makes sense.


Wade Hampton Miller
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Old 07-09-2014, 10:50 PM
kydave kydave is offline
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I'm finding a photo in The Book of a 1904 Martin 00-42 with an ivory pickguard inlaid into the spruce, but as far as a standard feature, with Martin it began in the steel string era in the '20s.
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Old 07-10-2014, 05:11 AM
HHP HHP is offline
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Funny thing about the cowboy movies, they used modern guitars but real antique firearms. Even the low budget B pics. You could auction off the prop firearms in a lot of these and finance a new Star Wars episode.
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Old 07-10-2014, 06:25 PM
Misifus Misifus is offline
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I have a round back mandolin which dates from about 1898, which has a genuine tortoise shell pick guard inlayed in the top.
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