This rare 1941 Kay Carson Robison guitar bears traces of multiple repairs done over time.
Today, we’re familiar with the names Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, but back then, any cowboy fan would have also known Carson Robison. Robison was born in 1890 to a champion-fiddler father and a dance-caller mother. In the 1920s, he was one of the first cowboy singers to become a radio performer, famous for his virtuosic whistling ability. He wrote over 300 songs in his career, including his 1948 hit, “Life Gets Tee-Jus, Don’t It,” featured in episode 123 of the original Muppet Show, which is how I first heard of him.
The Montgomery Ward catalog offered Carson Robison-model guitars from 1930 through 1941. The 6-string changed a little every couple of years, ultimately ending up with eight different variations. The subject of this month’s column is the rare eighth variation, also called Model 964, made only for a short time in the fall of 1941 by the Kay Musical Instrument Company. According to the original catalog, it has a “Selected Spruce Top” and mahogany back and sides, and the top is solid wood as far as we can tell. The back and sides, however, are made of a few disparate pieces. The body on this guitar was shrunk from the previous grand auditorium size (41 1/4 x 16 1/4) to a smaller grand concert size (39 1/2 x 14), and it has a distinctive oval-shaped soundhole. Like the other Carson Robison guitars, it has his signature painted on the body, below the bridge.
Also known as Model 964, this version of the Carson Robison is the eighth variation on the original.
Photo by Madison Thorn
This particular example has had a number of repairs over the years. The tuners are newer, and it’s had a bone saddle installed. Its amber sunburst finish has some overspray, likely covering a past repair. It’s also had a refret and a neck reset, and it’s playing better than ever. The neck has a chunky V-shape, which is typical for these early-20th century guitars that were made before truss rods. It’s got a bunch of dings, finish-checking, and evidence of past repairs, which I think adds character. I like to imagine this guitar had a dynamic early life, being played and loved by some rowdy siblings.
While researching this model, we at Fanny’s House of Music in Nashville came across a clipping of the 1941 Montgomery Ward catalog this guitar was listed in and found something curious cut off on the left side of the page. Featured right next to the Carson Robison guitar was a 6-string bearing the name of Louise Massey. Could it be that not all singing cowboys were boys? I found myself in the throes of a deep Google search when our old friend Frank Hall came to the rescue.
“I like to imagine this guitar had a dynamic early life, being played and loved by some rowdy siblings.”
Frank Hall was a fixture here in Nashville. He was a member of the Serendipity Singers, a folk group that performed at Woodstock. He was also a lifelong guitar collector and one of the world’s preeminent “catalog guitar” experts. He came into Fanny’s often to tell us stories about these old guitars, and when we were lucky, he’d play us a song. Frank passed away in early 2021, but he left us with a wealth of knowledge, and importantly, for our purposes today, a tome called Cowboy Guitars by Steve Evans and Ron Middlebrook.
Time and wear have given this guitar a character as craggy as the old West.
Photo by Madison Thorn
The owners of Fanny’s, Pamela Cole and Leigh Maples, plopped it open on our front desk to page 106, where I read the history of Louise Massey and the Kay-made Montgomery Ward guitar that bears her name. Louise was known for her hit song “My Adobe Hacienda,” a beautiful tune calling back to the real heroes of cowboy culture, Mexican vaqueros. Her signature guitar was only made for a few short months in the fall of 1941, at the same time as our Carson Robison. As far as we know, it is the only cowboy guitar to feature a woman artist. Not even the Queen of the West, Dale Evans, had that honor!
This wonderful Kay acoustic took us on quite a journey. We love the stories in these old guitars, and we especially love seeing them write new stories with new owners. Sometimes all it takes is a neck set, and a little flattop like this one is all ready to inspire a new generation. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go scour eBay for a Louise Massey guitar.
This Kay K-5924 semi-hollowbody (from either 1966 or ’67) is the first electric bass Anna Butterss bought, on the advice of her friend, producer-musician Paul Bryan.
Aside from Butterss’ impressive formal musical education on upright, and the subsequent following she’s gathered in the jazz community, she’s also now five years into playing electric bass and has performed with Aimee Mann, Phoebe Bridgers, and Bright Eyes, among others. These alternative musical experiences permeate the songs on Activities just as much as her work with jazz luminaries Makaya McCraven, Jeff Parker, and Larry Goldings.
Doo Wop
Anchored by Butterss’ kinetic bass playing, the multi-layered soundscapes of Activities effortlessly fuse these seemingly disparate musical genres. Labeled as experimental/ambient jazz, Activities certainly fits that description, but the record also incorporates indie- and world-music elements, and emphasizes atmosphere and composition over all else. From the opening East Asian vibes of “Entrance” to the alternative rumble of brooding synths on “Super Lucrative” to the gorgeous jazz-chamber-like ode of “Blevins” to the creeping, crawling, avant-garde upright bass exercise of “Do Not Disturb,” Butterss’ deftly demonstrates that feel is the definitive muse fueling her creative output and connecting the dots between her broad musical tastes. “I’ve gone between playing a lot of different styles of music,” she admits. “And that seems to have converged pretty organically on Activities, which I’m happy about.”
Butterss started out on upright when she was just 13. She got into what she calls “the nitty-gritty” of playing the upright bass, “a complicated and difficult instrument,” first at the University of Adelaide in Australia (where she’s from) and then at graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington. She majored in Jazz Bass at both. She also spent much of those formative years learning classical music and playing in orchestras. Though she “dabbled” in electric bass on and off during that time, she didn’t seriously start playing it until about five years ago, after settling in Los Angeles. “I started getting interested in indie-music styles,” she recalls. “It’s not like they necessarily require electric bass, but I felt I’d have more opportunities to play a wider range of music. So, that was the impulse.”
“My dear friend Paul Bryan, who’s a great bass player, and producer and writer, sat down with me and was like, ‘Look, this is what you should buy. This is a good deal, buy this one.’”
Though there are obvious similarities between upright and electric bass, but Butterss says learning to play the latter was like learning a different instrument. “The tuning is the same, the strings are the same, and I guess the function that they play in the music is the same,” she explains. “But that seems really surface-level when you’re dealing with a totally different timbre and a totally different texture. I was surprised at how different they were. I started not thinking of them as related in any way.”
She describes the upright bass as the instrument that she feels the most comfortable on, and the one where she has already developed a sound. When she started playing electric bass, she had to start from square one in learning how to play it. “For the first two years, it really felt like I could play the instrument—I knew where the notes were, I could execute things that I needed to execute in whatever song I was playing, but I don’t know if I necessarily felt like I had a concrete sound or style on the instrument the same way that I did on upright, so that’s definitely been a work-in-progress.”
Anna Butterss recorded her solo debut, Activities, with Pete Min at his studio, Lucy’s Meat Market, in Eagle Rock, California.
When it comes to other bass players, Butterss admits she’s never really been one for direct influences but does namecheck a few OGs of electric bass. “When I started getting into electric bass, I was listening to Willie Weeks, some James Jamerson, a fair amount of Meshell Ndegeocello, who is someone I’m always listening to a fair amount of, really [laughter],” she chuckles. “I listen to a lot of things, and maybe one particular moment or feeling from one song on one record will stand out to me and I’ll carry that with me, but it’s never like, ‘Okay this is the bass player I’m going to play like.’”
The first electric bass she bought was an old Kay K-5924 Semi-Hollow Body from about 1966 or ’67 that she still uses. “I bought it because my dear friend, Paul Bryan [Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright], who’s a great bass player and producer and writer, sat down with me and was like, ‘Look, this is what you should buy. This is a good deal, buy this one.’ He was a mentor and someone whose sensibility on the instrument I’ve always appreciated—maybe not specific things about the way that he played, but his general approach to the instrument definitely influenced me.”
Anna Butterss’ Gear
Butterss is an in-demand bassist who has played with Phoebe Bridgers, Aimee Mann, Jenny Lewis, Madison Cunningham, and more.
Photo by Zach Caddy
Basses
- Kay K-5924 (’66 or ’67)
- Guild Starfire II
- 1930s German-made upright bass (unknown maker)
- Realist LifeLine Upright Bass Pickup
Strings, Picks & Accessories
- LaBella 760FS Deep Talkin’ Flats (electric)
- Pirastro Evah Pirazzi Slap (upright)
- Dunlop Tortex Standard 1.0 mm and 1.14 mm
- Mono Bass Cases
Effects
- MXR M234 Analog Chorus
- MXR M133 Micro Amp
- Electro-Harmonix Micro POG
- Moog Minifooger MF Delay
Amps
- Aguilar Tone Hammer 500 (head)
- Aguilar SL 112 (cabinet)
For recording Activities, Butterss went mostly direct with the electric bass. She did bring one of her own basses and played it on one song, but because Activities was recorded at Pete Min’s studio, Lucy’s Meat Market in Eagle Rock, California, she had a lot of “really interesting instruments” at her disposal.
“At the start of the recording process, I was gravitating towards all these semi-hollow-bodies, like Kay and Harmony basses, with really warm sounds,” she attests. “And by the end of the record, everything I was playing was like Jazz bass with the tone rolled all the way off. I got all that warmth out of my system [laughter].”
“By the end of the record, everything I was playing was like Jazz bass with the tone rolled all the way off. I got all that warmth out of my system [laughter].”
One of the recording/mixing strategies Butterss and Min utilized for several bass tracks on Activities was to record the electric bass, convert it to MIDI, and then layer synths on it. “Limitations and Dogma,” for example, which also employs a chorus effect on the bass, displays this technique. “I recorded the electric bass part, which is kind of like a solo, and then we converted it to MIDI and layered some synths on it, and then switched those in and out,” explains Butterss. “We did that on ‘The Worst Thing You Could Do for Your Health,’ too.”
On “Ben,” she stumbled across a happy accident. “On the part at the end, I’d been playing something with an overdrive pedal on guitar and we just plugged the bass into the same [signal] chain, and I forgot to turn off the overdrive, so we started tracking and the bass came in super-hot and distorted, but it ended up being a really cool sound.”
Anna Butterss started playing upright bass at age 13 and studied jazz bass at both the University of Adelaide in Australia (where she’s from) and Indiana University in Bloomington.
Photo by Ted Miller
While the aforementioned tunes exemplify Butterss’ approach to tracking electric bass, “Do Not Disturb” epitomizes her upright sound and technique. Raw, aggressive, and frighteningly fierce, it captures the rhythmic nature of her ability that makes her so desirable to others as a side person.
“I had an idea about how I wanted that song to feel, and I started it on upright, trying to get a weird, creepy, kind of messy-but-driving crazy feeling, and it was really hard to do it,” she explains. “I was in there for a while trying to figure it out, and then Pete and I listened back in the control room, and it’s just me, trying, and then stopping, and then swearing a little bit and then trying again, and, at some point, I’m just like, ‘How do you do this?’ So, we ended up splicing it together, which is what I wanted to do anyway. I wanted it to feel organic, as in acoustic, but also with this weird element of robotic-ness. There’s something alien about it. I wanted it to sound more like a sample, rather than something that we just recorded acoustically with a beautiful sound. And then we converted it to MIDI and layered a synth on top of it to make it sound even weirder. I really wanted it to feel like a hybrid of that fundamental acoustic sound with all these extra layers on top of it.”
“I wanted it to feel organic, as in acoustic, but also with this weird element of robotic-ness—there’s something alien about it.”
When it comes to playing someone else’s music, whether jazz, indie, or otherwise, Butterss says she needs to be thinking about what they want in their music rather than anything to do with the technical aspects of bass playing. “I’m lucky in that most of the people I work with now, at this point in my career, call me because they want me to have my own musical opinions and my own input within their music,” she says. “I feel like I do have a lot of freedom to follow my own instincts.”
Circling back to her earlier sentiment about preferring to follow her senses over shredding, she concludes that she’s at her best when she’s thinking about music as “an act of service. The more I can think of the broader impact of the whole musical landscape, rather than thinking about whatever I’m playing on the instrument, technically speaking, I think the better it is.”
YouTube It—Jenny Lewis: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
Anna Butterss plays her 1930s German double bass and sings backing vocals for Jenny Lewis during a recent NPR Tiny Desk concert.