Travis was having trouble with his guitar’s vibrato unit, which was the side-pull type designed by Doc Kauffman (Leo Fender’s early partner). Sometime in the 1940s, he met fingerpicking legend Merle Travis, who was also a motorcycle enthusiast. Bigsby was a factory foreman and the designer of many Crocker components.īigsby was a fan of the Western music that began to flourish in southern California after the Depression and the Dust Bowl of the mid ’30s forced many families to move westward from Oklahoma and surrounding states. Hired by the Los Angeles-based Crocker Motorcycle Company, which produced the most powerful racing and road motorcycles from 1932 to ’42, when production ceased for World War II. Born in 1899, he started his professional career as a motorcycle racer. Paul Adelbert Bigsby – “P.A.” to his friends – was a late bloomer as a guitar maker. And if that’s not rare enough, consider the setting of this story – this Bigsby tenor was used exclusively in a Christian music group, which is the last place one would expect to find an electric guitar of any sort in the 1950s. Consequently, electric tenors are relatively rare, and a tenor guitar made by solidbody pioneer Paul Bigsby is one of the rarest of all electric guitars. Photo: Kelsey Vaughn, courtesy George Gruhn.īy the advent of the solidbody electric guitar in the 1950s, tenor guitarists were a dying breed.
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