Faced with anemic sales of its Les Paul Model in 1958, Gibson spiffed-up its goldtop with a sunburst finish in an attempt to outdo Fender’s two-toned Strat, rechristened it the “Les Paul Standard,” and hoped for the best.
The old trick didn’t work, but the Kalamazoo company had been there before.
Four decades prior, Gibson’s executive suite played a slightly different version of the sunburst card to deal with a similar sales crisis – the fading popularity of its best-selling instruments after a shift in American musical tastes at the beginning of the Jazz Age.
The company’s effort to sustain its mandolin family is shown in general manager L.A. Williams’ 1914 advertising copy for the K-4 mandocello, touting its “violin shading from red to brown,” enhanced in 1918 by newly hired sales and advertising manager C.V. Buttelman to read, “…finished in an exquisite blend from dark mahogany to sunburst,” his more-florid style further exhibited in copy with luminous imagery like “The Old Canoe – Moonlight – and us too,” and “When the Lights are Low.”
But it had little effect as the tsunami that was jazz eventually brought the tenor banjo to the fore, leaving the mandolin in its slow (but gargantuan) wake. As told by Walter Carter in his 2016 book, Mandolin in America, by the end of the ’30s, the mando wasn’t important enough to be included in Glen Miller’s hit song “The Man With the Mandolin.”
Nonetheless, that change in marketing copy reveals a centuries-old connection shared by all shaded instruments – the history of the sunburst, hiding in plain sight.* * *
Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737) toiled in his workshop in Cremona until the age of 93, and along the way created a revolution of his own. Innovating the design of the violin, his changes transformed a slight, sweet-sounding instrument into an acoustic powerhouse so resounding that great violins came to be broadly referenced as “Strads.” Initially renowned for their amazing sound, the instruments acquired a secondary reputation for their worn look as time took its toll.
”The classic ‘christmas tree’ wear pattern on the back of a 17th- or 18th-century violin has an interesting and, in the long run, troublesome origin,” said British violinist Peter Sheppard Skaerved when asked about the transformation of Stradiviari’s violins from shiny and new to antiques from another era. “The shape resulted from the back rubbing against the shoulder and arm of the player whilst the instrument was being held relatively low. And then the 19th century comes along and venerates the mark of time passing on both the sight and sound of these instruments as a ne plus ultra, which I am sure would horrify their makers.”
What might have been one man’s monstrosity became the next generation’s masterpiece.
“One of the reasons we love these instruments is because they are unbelievably beautiful,” said Skaerved in a 2014 lecture at the Library of Congress. “But don’t forget one thing: the beauty of an instrument like this is about 60 percent due to the fact that it has changed because we have had it in our hands. Oxidation, sweat… and when you dent an instrument, dirt makes its way into the scratch.”
In other words, old violins have maximum mojo, and buyers – like guitar and mandolin players want now – craved instruments that had it. As Doc Watson once said, “That old Gibson J-35 I played was as good a guitar as I’ve ever played. It was a good old well-used guitar with scratches and scuff marks. It had some ‘prestige,’ in other words.”
Watson wasn’t wrong, but this mindset led to a conundrum for violin makers of the 19th century.
“Varnish wear implies lots of usage, and lots of usage implies age and quality, and that became the factor behind the antiquing of violins in the mid to late 19th century,” said stringed-instrument appraiser Philip Kass, echoing Watson’s sentiment. “The growing pressure on players was to have a violin that was clearly old, and thus showing lots of wear and tear. This became the mantra that has poisoned modern violin making since the late 19th century.”
The main problem with the “instant aged” technique was that the labor involved pushed prices much higher than most customers were willing to pay. For example, high-end firms like Ernst Heinrich Roth charged up to $300 for their artfully antiqued violins when most people were buying $10 fiddles. Market forces then pushed for a more-economical and efficient violin-shading practice that crudely imitated wear, but at a much lower cost, possibly aided by technology.
“If some sort of gentle shading was considered a plus because of the appearance of a multi-dimensional quality to the wood, then the great innovation was the spray gun, which made for more-efficient mass production at the end of the 19th to beginning of the 20th centuries,” said Kass.
It was then that the modern sunburst began to evolve. But it would take the mind of a Czech immigrant with a tendency for serious braggadocio to initiate…
For three days in March of 1901, the Chicago Tribune and papers around the country followed the saga of a horse that crashed into the basement of Joseph Bohmann’s instrument factory.
“Yes, I feed the horse, because I do not know what else to do,” the bewildered Bohmann said. “I’m afraid it might tackle something else, even my machinery, if it doesn’t get anything to eat. I’d rather pay for the hay than to have the horse continue its raid.”
The paper reported when the animal had been windlassed out of the building, and though it might have been the strangest press Bohmann had gotten, it wasn’t the first or the last time his name appeared in print.
Before winning medals for his instruments at World’s Fairs in Paris (1889), Chicago (’93), Antwerp (’94) and Atlanta (’95), in 1888 he kicked off an aggressive marketing campaign in a series of advertisements that challenged the world: “$80,000 to the manufacturer who can prove his ability to make the following instruments: viz, violins, zithers, Guitars and Mandolins to equal my own in tone and workmanship.”
There is no record of any luthier picking up the gauntlet.
Born in Austria in 1848, Bohmann apprenticed as a violin maker in Vienna in 1860 and might have immigrated to the United States as early as ’64. After bouncing around the country for a decade experiencing a mix of hard-labor jobs and bad luck, Bohmann opened a business in ’75 with considerable flair.
“‘The World’s Greatest Musical Instrument Manufacturer!’ This is how Joseph H. Bohmann described himself, and repeatedly. How much of it was hype, ego, or truth is difficult to say. Most of his biographical and promotional materials seem to have been authored by himself,” wrote Gregg Miner on his website about Bohmann’s harp guitars. “To me, his work is neither German nor American (more American), but wholly his own, with styles and techniques all over the place.”
It was with this startling mix of bravado and ingenuity that Bohmann started applying violin shading to his guitars. His 1899 catalog noted that on Styles 0 through 3 guitars (higher numbers had unshaded rosewood back and sides), the “maple is shaded in yellow, red and brown and has inlaid stripe on the back,” and is “…shaded with violin varnish, white, yellow, red and brownish colors.” In concert with the violin-antiquing practice of the time, Bohmann shaded the sides of his harp guitars to demonstrate the technique and use in advertisements.
Stringed-instrument authority, pioneering vintage-guitar dealer, and VG contributing editor George Gruhn said that while violin makers were producing relic finish instruments with wear patterns that resembled sunburst in the early 1800s, “I don’t know of any sunburst-finish guitars prior to Bohmann.”
In 1903, managers at the newly formed Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Mfg. Co., Ltd. must have been paying attention. Considering Bohmann’s guitars were very well-advertised and his factory was only 125 miles from Kalamazoo, it’s no wonder that in late 1905, one of its early changes to Orville’s original design included violin-shading the backs of F-4 mandolins. Like Stradivari two centuries before, the idea of antiquing new instruments probably would have been anathema to Orville. Curiously, Bohmann, who is credited as the first manufacturer of mandolins in America (having started in 1884), didn’t make the leap to sunbursting his bowlback mandos from this era.
Given that Gibson was charging at least $10 more than Washburn in 1911 as they were advertising their mandolins as “the best made – constructed and graduated like a violin,” it seems like violin shading, as Orville had transplanted the violin’s headstock scroll to the upper treble bout of the mandolin, was another way to justify the high prices of their mandolins. With no less than 34 references to the violin, a 1914 Gibson catalog noted, “Gibson instruments are finished by experienced workmen under the supervision of one who had made a life study of varnish as used on the violin.”
“I agree that Gibson borrowed the sunburst concept from violins, though not necessarily from Strads,” said Walter Carter. “Was sunburst a common violin finish of the day? Gibson’s attempt to link the mandocello finish with violin finishes would indicate yes. It’s a bit ironic that the sunburst finish was common on cheaper violins, but the average musician probably saw more cheap violins than Strads, so it was probably an effective marketing ploy.”
Gibson initially violin-shaded only the backs of F-4 mandolins, which makes sense as the pattern is only common on violin backs, and kept the front all one color – Black, Pumpkin, or Ivory. Sunbursting/violin-shading the front didn’t start until 1912, as F-4s from that year show.
What’s odd about the antiquing of the F-4 and (in 1912) L-4 guitars was it didn’t match normal wear patterns.
“I like the suggestion by Peter that the sunburst developed from use, with the light areas having been worn and the dark areas having collected dirt and grease,” said Folkway Music owner and Gibson repair specialist Mark Stutman. “It seems logical. Plus, on flat guitars, a natural finish wouldn’t take on a sunburst look over time, because of the very different way the instrument is held and used, its size, and its flatness. Flat-top patina develops in different ways than the violin and carved-instrument patina.”
In 1922, Gibson kicked its violin-masterpiece comparisons into high gear when it advertised Lloyd Loar’s innovative F-5 mandolin as, “The ‘Strad’ of Mandolins.” Replacing the Sheraton Brown finish, Fred Miller, foreman of Gibson’s finishing department, went so far as to name the sunburst finish “Cremona Brown” as a further nod to the Italian city where Stradivari worked.
Though its attempt six years earlier to prop up the mandolin market had met with limited success, Gibson hoped to buck the tenor-banjo trend with the far superior design of Loar’s F-5. With a stratospherically high price tag of $250, however, the company quickly rediscovered that the potential audience had disappeared to the point of obsolescence. The world may have never heard of Loar’s masterpiece if not for a chance encounter in a Florida barbershop 15 years later, when a cult following emerged thanks to the legendary hands of Bill Monroe.
Concurrently, the sunburst finish would become so popular that bluegrass, rock, and jazz would all eventually lay claim to it as part of their iconography – without ever acknowledging its classical roots.
This article originally appeared in VG’s November 2023 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
