Jazz musician Johnny Smith set the bar high when it came to the design of his signature model, doing his own research and hopping manufacturers when his expectations were left unmet.
A giant of mid-century jazz guitar, Johnny Smith had a fastidious style. He could strike rapid solos, embellish ballads with languid lines, and craft complex chords. Whatever he played, his intention and articulation were crystal clear. Smith’s music is “incredibly intricate and detailed, every note he played, there was nothing extra there. It’s just the essential thing,”—or so said the modern great Bill Frisell, when Reverb interviewed him and Mary Halvorson in 2018 around their Johnny Smith tribute album, The Maid with the Flaxen Hair. That same devotion to detail is apparent in the many signature guitar models that bear Smith’s name, like the 1968 Gibson Johnny Smith featured in this edition of Vintage Vault.
Smith played a lead role in the development of his guitars. Though there are several versions from various brands, they are essentially one model, made and remade to Smith’s liking or disliking. Like a great jazz tune, it was never played quite the same way twice.
In the mid ’50s, Smith first sketched out the theme of his signature model with Guild, not Gibson, having secured an endorsement deal from the then-NYC-based company. He had been playing a Guild X-500 (aka the Stuart), which was a 17″ archtop with two single-coil pickups screwed into the body. But Smith’s heart lay with a custom D’Angelico New Yorker, one with a solid spruce top and precise X-bracing that allowed it to boom like a speaker. He hung out at D’Angelico’s workshop and learned all he could about guitar design.
Unsatisfied with the signature model that Guild produced for him, Smith took his ideas over to Gibson, where he was given nearly complete control over a new design.
Photos courtesy of Reverb/Gitarren Total
Despite the detailed designs Smith handed to Guild’s founding president Al Dronge, what he got was something like a D’Angelico translated through the Guild X-500. Smith was after resonance and tone. He didn’t want anything interfering with the body. He requested that a single DeArmond pickup float above it, with the control knob and output jack affixed to the pickguard rather than the body. This, Guild granted him. But he also had ideas for the carved top and internal construction that he thought would increase balance and sustain, which Guild ignored. Like the X-500, Smith’s top was made with laminated spruce rather than solid wood.
Thus, 1956’s Guild Johnny Smith Award does represent the first record of his signature model—it had the 17″ body and floating pickup that would become a repeating chorus—but it didn’t live up to Smith’s standards. Only 20 or so were made, and soon, Guild and Smith annulled their partnership.
By 1961, Smith was working with Gibson’s Ted McCarty to realize his vision, while Guild had cut Smith’s name and re-released its guitar as the Artist Award. Smith, talking about his first Gibson in 2008, said he was given nearly complete control: “I designed everything myself. I designed how the guitar would be braced, how the top would be carved, the dimensions, the binding, and you name it. The only aspects the company did were some of the cosmetic touches which really did not matter to me.”
“Like a great jazz tune, it was never played quite the same way twice.”
The 17″ Gibson Johnny Smith was introduced with a slightly shallow depth (3 1/8″). Compared to his Guild, it had a 25″ scale (vs. 24.75″), a mini-humbucker rather than the DeArmond, and maybe most importantly to Smith, an X-braced top of carved solid spruce, just like his beloved D’Angelico.
The 2-pickup 1968 Johnny Smith Double variant you see here was first released in 1963. In 1968, a sunburst Johnny Smith Double—with two volume knobs, two tone controls, and a rotary selector—would have retailed for $1,145. Today, you could pay between $8,000–$16,000, depending on condition. This particular guitar, in very good, all-original condition aside from a replacement guard, is listed at $15,319 by the Switzerland-based Reverb seller Gitarren Total.
The guitar has a 17″ body made of flamed maple, with two floating humbuckers.
Photos courtesy of Reverb/Gitarren Total
With Gibson, Smith made the guitar of his dreams, but only for a time. In 1989, he transferred his artist model to Heritage, the company founded by former Gibson luthiers when Gibson moved from Kalamazoo. (Taking a cue from Guild, Gibson re-released its own Johnny Smith model by a different name, Le Grand, in 1993.)
When asked later to explain all his jumping around, Smith said, “Let’s just say I am very particular about instruments with my name on them,”—perhaps, fans of his music might say, as particular with the instruments as the notes he chose to play on them.
In a final twist, his signature model would have one last coda at the place where it all began. In 2002, Smith and Guild reunited, this time with renowned guitar maker Bob Benedetto at the helm of the archtop’s construction. The last Guild Smith signature stayed in production until 2007, while Smith himself passed away in 2013.
Sources: Reverb listings and Price Guide data, Gibson June 1968 price list, Gruhn’s Guide to Vintage Guitars, American Guitars: An Illustrated History by Tom Wheeler, “Johnny Smith Goes Full Circle” by Charles H. Chapman for Fender Players Club, “‘Just the Essential Thing’: Bill Frisell and Mary Halvorson Honor Johnny Smith’s Jazz Legacy” by Nick Millevoi for Reverb.On this month’s menu, a ’64 SG TV and a ’68 EB-0—prime examples of the company’s classic mahogany slab designs.
The successful sales of the Les Paul model, launched in 1952, convinced Gibson to expand its solidbody line to include a variety of guitars aimed at players from beginner to professional. This led to the introduction of both the low-priced, flat-bodied, single-pickup Les Paul Junior and the high-priced, elaborately appointed Les Paul Custom in July 1954. By 1955, the Les Paul line also included the Les Paul TV (aka TV Yellow) and the Les Paul Special. The Les Paul Special, TV, and Junior became double cutaway by 1958.
This close-up shows both instruments in remarkably good condition, as well as their to-the-point electronics.
By 1960, waning sales for Gibson’s original Les Paul guitars prompted the company to completely redesign them. The Les Paul Standard and Custom joined the Junior, TV, and Special as part of Gibson’s line of slimmed-down mahogany-body guitars. They were reshaped to include pointed horns and beveled outer sides. The new double-cutaway body left easy access to all 22 frets. The already double-cutaway, flat-slab-bodied Les Paul Junior, SG TV, and SG Special received the new dimensions and contours during 1961. (The Les Paul TV and Les Paul Special had been renamed “SG” in late 1959.) This whole group of guitars became known as the SG Series when Les Paul’s endorsement ended in 1963.
Gibson introduced its first electric bass guitar in 1953 and named it the ‘Electric Bass.’ (Catchy, right?)
The SG TV’s early catalog description explained the important details: “Ultra-thin, contoured, double-cutaway body, nickel-plated metal parts, quality machine heads. Slim, fast, low-action neck-with exclusive extra-low frets—joins body at the 22nd fret. One-piece mahogany neck, adjustable truss rod. rosewood fingerboard, pearl dot inlays. Combination bridge and tailpiece, adjustable horizontally and vertically. Powerful pickup with individually adjustable polepieces.”The original price for the 1964 SG TV pictured was about $147.50. The current value is $5,000. The guitar was the soul of simplicity, with a single bridge P-90 and one volume and one tone control.
And now, let’s look at our SG’s 4-stringed friend.Gibson introduced its first electric bass guitar in 1953 and named it the “Electric Bass.” (Catchy, right?) It was followed by various EB models over the next several years, including the semi-hollow EB-2 in 1958 and the double-cutaway solidbody EB-0 in 1959. By 1961, the EB series also received the thin SG-shaped body.
This 100-watt Marshall PA head, with four sets of inputs, is rare and currently valued at about $10,000.
The 1966 catalog describes the latter model as “a new, economy-priced solidbody bass by Gibson—it offers clear sustaining bass response, easy fast playing action, modern cherry red finish.”Although a custom color option is not mentioned, the 1968 example pictured is finished in a white similar to the SG TV. Like it’s SG counterpart on display this month, this bass has a single pickup and one volume and one tone control. The original price was about $240. The current value is $2,500.
Behind the instruments is a 1967 Marshall PA. This 1968 JTM100 Super PA head pushes 100 watts through two columns of four 12"20-watt Celestion greenback speakers. The controls on the head are power and standby switches, presence, bass, middle, and treble, plus four loudness controls for each channel, along with two input jacks each for channels 1 through 4. About £200 in British currency could get you this PA in 1967. The current value is $10,000.
Sources for this article include Gibson Electrics: The Classic Yearsby A.R. Duchossoir, Gibson Guitars: Ted McCarty’s Golden Era—1948-1966 by Gil Hembree, and The History of Marshall: The First Fifty Years by Michael Doyle and Nick Bowcott.
Patterned on Mosrite’s Joe Maphis model, this luxurious guitar is truly one of a kind.
Before the Mosrite brand was born, its founder, Semie Moseley, was just an independent luthier trying to make a splash. In the same way Paul Reed Smith pitched his pre-factory builds to Carlos Santana and Heart’s Nancy Wilson, Moseley found his first golden ticket in a Southern Californian picker by the name of Joe Maphis.
Back in the mid-1950s, Moseley got fired from Rickenbacker after making a guitar of his own. Soon after, he built a three-necked amalgamation that contained a standard guitar, an octave guitar (one octave higher), and a mandolin—all in a single solidbody electric. The goal was to attract attention, and attract attention it did.
Joe Maphis was a flashy country player who led the Town Hall Party radio show, which was beamed all over Southern California and into Northern Mexico. Maphis requested a double-neck version (without the mandolin), and from then on Moseley was a known entity, crafting about one custom instrument a month for years.
This close-up brings the brass nut, elegant binding, Grover tuners, and sterling silver headstock inlay into focus.
Later, in 1960, Maphis got a proper Moseley-made signature model, with a body that looked like an upside-down Stratocaster. In the early ’60s, the Ventures—the top-selling instrumental rock group who helped codify surf music—became Mosrite’s distributor. They took a Maphis-style signature guitar as their own, and created a rush of capital and orders.
Johnny Ramone’s 1965 Mosrite Ventures II model fetched nearly $1 million at auction in 2021.
Business went up, business went down. Mosrite’s distributor agreements and parent companies came and went. As Moseley wrote to clients and inquirers in 1986: “Some day, in the near future, the Semie Moseley and Mosrite Guitar story will be in process. It will read like a fairytale—a drama—a love story; from rags to riches—to rags—to the fight back, from one major tragedy to another, from the very beginning through its evolution to the 1980s.”
But by then, despite the vagaries of the musical instruments industry, Moseley was back doing what he had always done best: building incredible custom guitars. And that’s where we pick up the story for this month’s Vintage Vaultfind.
Walnut pickup rings machined to match the bird’s-eye maple body surround these split-coil humbuckers.
After Maphis’ death in 1986, Moseley created this one-of-a-kind beauty for a friend, Ross Coan Jr. While standard Joe Maphis models had spruce tops and single-coil pickups, this Maphis-style custom build has a bird’s-eye maple top and unique split-coil humbuckers. But it retains the bound neck and beveled edges that Moseley must have learned first-hand from Rickenbacker’s Roger Rossmeisl, along with the angled neck pickup, metal nut, dual-knob, and 3-way pickup-selector switch of Moseley’s previous models. And the headstock and fretboard inlays are sterling silver.
Take a look at those pickup rings, too, which—unlike pickup rings on nearly any other custom guitar—are remarkably gorgeous and carved out of a wood that perfectly complements the maple top. Obviously, Moseley put a great deal of care and consideration into this build. He even stamped the name and date of birth of his friend at the very last fret and inscribed the back of the headstock: “Hand made for Ross Coan Jr. by Semie Moseley 1986.”
It’s impossible to put a price on what this guitar would’ve cost back then. Whether it was a gift or a commission, it was a labor of love—a late-career testament to Moseley’s guitar-building prowess.
The back of this unique guitar is made of figured walnut.
George Gruhn writes that Moseley’s pre-Ventures custom guitars are highly sought-after by collectors. Johnny Ramone’s 1965 Mosrite Ventures II model fetched nearly $1 million at auction in 2021. But most production-era Mosrites—those that were notplayed by famous musicians—often sell on Reverb in the range of several thousand dollars.
Moseley signed and dated the headstock of this guitar built for his friend Ross Coan Jr.
This custom build from Moseley himself, who died just a few years later, in 1992, is currently listed for $12,500.
Sources include Reverb listings and pricing data, American Guitars: An Illustrated History by Tom Wheeler, and Gruhn’s Guide to Vintage Guitars.