Anyone familiar with Tarrega brand guitars?

[Wade Hampton]

This weekend I'm headed to a remote Alaskan town to play a concert Saturday evening and play music at their local Episcopal church Sunday morning. The woman who put this all together for me is an Episcopal priest who has a music ministry that she takes into Alaska Native villages: she takes instruments with her and gets the village kids started on the basics.

She asked me to pick up a guitar that had been donated to the program and left at my church in Anchorage, St. Mary's Episcopal. "It's worth $600, the donor told us."

Okay. So I swung by there a little while ago and picked up the guitar.

It's worth perhaps half of what the donor told her, but it's kind of intriguing, nonetheless.

Solid spruce top, crackled but not abused nitro-cellulose lacquer finish, laminated maple or birch sides, book-matched Brazilian rosewood headstock veneer. Nylon strings. Inside the soundhole there's one paper label that reads "TARREGA Fine Classical Guitars......Distributed by Fender Sales Inc....Santa Ana California."

Below the paper label there's an oval red and gold foil label that says "Made In Sweden."

On the top there's a Post-It note that says: "Guitar's name: Betsy"

I guess if anyone wants to CALL the guitar, it's probably a good idea to know its name so it'll come....

In terms of the overall quality and materials used, it's a very close match to a Made-in-Sweden Goya classical guitar a friend of mine has, which was made by the Levin Guitar Company of Goteborg, Sweden. Given the probable age of this Tarrega guitar, I'm guessing it was made by Levin, as well.

I've just never heard of this brand name before, so I'm assuming it was a short-lived import line for Fender. Have any of you seen or heard of this brand?

Yes, I know you'd like photos, but, sorry, I can't provide any. But here's the description again: solid spruce top, laminated maple or birch back and sides, made in Sweden classical guitar. Tarrega brand, distributed by Fender.

And - again, this is important - the guitar's name is "Betsy."

Any information any of you might have would be welcomed. And if you have a similar guitar named "Steve" or "Tom," maybe we could put them together on a blind date. Who knows, maybe we'd get a litter of ukuleles that way....

Seriously, any information you might have would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.


Wade Hampton Miller

[Glennwillow]

Hi Wade,

What a fun post! And how great is it to know Betsy's name?!

I wish I could help further by actually answering your question instead of smiling at your post, but I have no idea what a Tarrega guitar is. I only know Tarrega, the guitar composer.

Good luck with this adventure. It sounds like an episode out of "Northern Exposure."

- Glenn

[lpa53]

Some links:

http://theunofficialmartinguitarforu...2#.UgwkO2t5mSM

http://www.vintage-guitars.se/Bjarton_Tarrega.htm

http://www.normansrareguitars.com/ta...by-fender.html

[Wade Hampton]

Lpa, thank you so much for the links you provided. The two most informative were the discussion on the Unofficial Martin forum and the website maintained by a store called Vintage Guitars in Stockholm, Sweden.

Here's the story on this guitar, summarized for those of you who are only mildly interested: Tarrega guitars were a brand name created by Fender when it decided it wanted in on the boom in folk guitars during the early 1960's. This was before Fender started making its own line of ghastly-sounding acoustic guitars in California, the ones with the huge plastic tubes running through the body cavity.

The Tarrega line existed from 1961 to 1966, and the model I have here is an FT-111, which was made in 1963 and 1964. Interestingly, the serial number on this one is six digits past the latest reported on the Vintage Guitars store website (I just sent them an email thanking them for the information and letting them know I have a slightly later one here.)

These guitars were made by a Swedish company called Bjärton, which did a lot of business with a chain of Swedish music stores called - are you ready for this? - Hägstrom. Hägstrom had the license or franchise or whatever it was to sell Fender guitars and amps in Sweden. So when Hershman Music of New York started doing very well with their line of of Goya guitars built for them by Levin in Sweden, Fender said to Hägstrom: "Hey, any way we can get a piece of this?" to which Hägstrom said: "Sure, we'll talk to our pals at Bjärton."

Or words to that effect....

What I also found interesting was that the similarities between this guitar and a friend's Swedish-made Goya might be because Bjärton could have made both of them. Evidently Levin couldn't produce enough guitars to meet demand during the Big Folk Scare of the Early 1960's, so Bjärton produced some nylon string guitars and labeled them as Goyas for Hershman Music, too.

There's an interesting exchange between an American collector who thinks he knows the true story about these guitars and a Swede who politely, gently and diplomatically corrects him here on this thread from 2007 on the Unofficial Martin forum:

http://theunofficialmartinguitarforu...2#.UgxN3dKshFB

Something I learned during the time I spent in Sweden is that the Swedes are wonderfully polite and generous people, and I thank Magnus Hultin for the information he shared and the gracious way he shared it in that thread.

Anyway, thanks again for those links, Lpa. That was precisely the sort of information I was looking for, and I learned something new about Swedish-made Goya guitars at the same time!


Wade Hampton Miller

[Dru Edwards]

Great story Wade. The Post-It note with "Betsy" on it will help with the provenance

I did find some info on the Fender website which shows the model names, year, MSRP, and wood.

https://www.fender.com/support/artic...roduct-dating/

BTW, have a great week-end playing and safe travels.

[Wade Hampton]

Thanks, Dru. The dates on the Fender website don't quite match those on the Swedish website, but that's not a problem for me, since I don't plan to research a master's thesis on this. Encountering this guitar has taught me some new things about Folk Boom-era acoustic guitars from Sweden, which is not a subject that preoccupies me night after sleepless night.

But I do have a slight interest in these instruments because my older sister's first decent guitar was a cool little Swedish-made Goya (definitely built by Levin) that she got when I was still pretty young. We belted out many a heartfelt rendition of "If I Had A Hammer" and "The Times They Are A-Changing" to the accompaniment of that guitar, so I do have an abiding interest in this particular little bit of guitar history.


whm

[lpa53]

Glad to have been of help, Wade. It's amazing what you can find - and learn - on the web. It brings the whole world together.

[Wade Hampton]

i notified the gentleman who maintains the Vintage Guitar store website in Stockholm that this guitar has a serial number six digits past what he has reported as the last one for this model. He thanked me for the information and asked me for a photo of it for the website, as he doesn't have a photo of that particular model (FT-111) to show.

So I'm going to try to get that taken care of here tonight before I leave for Prince William Sound tomorrow.


whm