C. F. Martin and His Guitars, 1796-1873 (review)

The American guitar, like various genres of American music, is loved and imitated the world over. In a beautiful and well researched book designed to appeal to historians of business, material culture, and the United States, as well as to guitar obsessives, Philip Gura provides a new perspective on how the emerging market economy operated, using the example of the "guitarmania" of the nineteenth-century. He also demonstrates how Christian Frederick Martin, by emphasizing personalized workmanship during a time of increasing mass production and distribution, was a key early figure in a nation fascinated with the guitar.

In the 1820s, Europe dominated all facets of the guitar trade. Famous classical composers and performers utilized the instrument, but "guitarmania" blossomed in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s because of its appeal to amateur musicians. Most significant figures in American music were untrained, and the initial decades of "guitarmania" coincided with the arrival of the earliest of those artists, the Hutchinson Family and Stephen Foster, whose music could be strummed on a guitar after the novice learned a few simple chords. Gura argues that the guitar became "democratized" in America. Also, as proven by a series of photographs from the period, guitars became a badge of middle-class status as much as the piano in the parlor, and were cheaper and more portable. Just as the Hutchinsons and Foster provided the blueprint for a distinctly American music, Martin provided a lasting identity for the American guitar.

Martin arrived in New York City in 1833, after apprenticing for more than a decade with master Viennese guitar maker Johann Georg Stauffer. Martin may have emigrated because of a bitter dispute in his native Saxony over which guild (the violin makers or the cabinet makers) had the right to craft guitars. When the American guitar industry flourished in the 1830s, the market rewarded the most skilled and efficient manufacturers; artisanal regulations did not figure into the equation. Martin's designs built on what he learned in Stauffer's workshop, along with his own artistic sensibilities and the demands of the American market.

When Martin left New York for Nazareth, Pennsylvania, in 1839, his business evolved, influenced by the changes occurring within the nation's business, transportation, and mail systems. In New York, Martin featured no standard models, and customers requested individualized features for their guitars. By the late 1840s, as his business and reputation became national in scope, he found it more difficult to work in this manner, and could no longer rely on one-on-one relationships. The new market economy, with its less personalized business culture, mandated that Martin sign exclusive regional deals, sometimes with strangers, to distribute his guitars. As music stores consolidated and focused on becoming interstate entities the way rail systems did, Martin mechanized production of his guitars, though he insisted on finishing his products by hand so that they retained their aura of craftsmanship within the increasingly industrialized American guitar marketplace. Other companies manufactured several times the guitars Martin produced to satisfy the demands of department stores and national chains, and sometimes allowed retailers to emblazon their name on the guitar instead of the manufacturer. Martin resisted these trends, and accepted a lower profit margin, believing correctly that "his guitars represented the apogee of the instrument's form, like a Stradivarius violin" (p. 134), and that a certain demographic, especially professional musicians, would always value such quality.

Gura's work principally draws from the previously unused files of the Martin company. By detailing the inventory and sales records from the music store Martin operated in New York City, Gura paints a full portrait of the antebellum music scene, demonstrating how Martin serviced men and women, blacks and whites, minstrel and classical musicians, and all classes. Color reproductions of Martin's ledgers and tools give us a glimpse of the materials behind Gura's history. Small telling details are highlighted in the book's numerous...