Floyd Riggs's $21 Kalamazoo

An archtop Gibson on a workingman's budget

__________________________________________

             ©  2016 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved

This gutsy little archtop is one of 14 instruments once owned by Floyd A. Riggs (1923-2001), who was raised in St. Marys WV (pop. 2,201 in 1940).
     
One of eight kids in the family and all of 14 years old when he acquired it, Riggs spent a hefty $21 on this guitar when it was new in 1937. Riggs played this archtop sunburst 'Zoo for the rest of his life.

     
During World War II Riggs served in the U.S. Army. In 1947 he wed Lucy Dearth of St. Marys and relocated 23 miles to Parkersburg WV (pop. 30,103 in 1950).
     
Most of his adult life, however, Floyd Riggs resided in Vienna WV, a small town along the Ohio River (pop. 9,381 in 1960). Located five miles north of Parkersburg, today it is hemmed in by suburban tract houses and shopping centers that have sprouted there.

Riggs was "a versatile picker, but he did not sing"

As an adult Riggs labored 25 years in the purchasing department of Borg Warner, a large chemical company in Washington WV, eight miles west of Parkersburg. During this time he was a member of Parkersburg Masonic Lodge #169, Wayside United Methodist Church in Vienna and a local Musician's Union.

At night and on weekends, however, he loved to played guitar, mandolin and banjo. He played at a variety of social events, local jamborees and the grange, friends recalled.
     
"Floyd played pop songs of the day on the guitar, but he also played tenor banjo and mandolin, " said Richard Powell, an instrument dealer in Belmont WV, also a small Ohio River town.
     
"He owned 14 instruments, but I only got three to sell from the estate when he passed — this 1937 Kalamazoo KG-21, a Gibson A-0 mandolin and a 1936 Kalamazoo mandolin."

Powell said he and Riggs were occasional friends, musically speaking. "I remember we played music together at a bluegrass festival sometime in the 1970s," Powell said in November 2004 at a guitar show near Philadelphia when I acquired the Riggs KG-21 guitar from him for $850.

     
"He kept all his instruments in immaculate condition," recalled Powell as he pointed to the pristine KG-21. "He was a versatile picker, but he did not sing."

Gibson sales literature in mid-1930s
displayed Kalamazoo KG-21 archtop.

Gibson's budget brands

During the Depression years Gibson Inc. of Kalamazoo MI made several lines of low-cost guitars, mandolins and banjos. Rather than sully their distinguished brand, Gibson made budget-priced instruments under other names, including Kalamazoo, Kel Kroydon, Hayden, Cromwell and Recording King.

     
Offered by music-instrument distributors, retailers and mail-order houses, the budget editions were all well-made items with minor cosmetic changes. None had an adjustable truss rod in the neck — a patented and costly feature Gibson first used in 1923. And tops on the budget flattops were ladder-braced, not X-braced, which used more labor and material.
     
More important to Depression-era musicians, however, retail prices for this second tier of instruments were less than Gibson-branded equivalents. For instance, between 1936 and 1942 prices for a Kalamazoo KG-21 ranged from $17.50 to $21, or two-thirds of the cost for the Gibson L-30, a fully-configured counterpart to the KG-21.

In either case, the spruce top and mahogany neck each have the iconic Gibson sunburst, the lustrous two-tone finish applied by the same workmen's hands at the Gibson factory.

FON dates KG-21 to 1937
The Riggs archtop's FON (324 C 53) is stamped on the interior surface of the back and visible through the treble-side f-hole. It is identified in period shipping ledgers as a 1937 KG-21 in Spann's Guide to Gibson 1902-1941 (2011 - Centerstream Publg.)
     
This instrument has a steam-bent and pressed spruce top that is supported by an H-brace. Its solid one-piece mahogany back was also steam-bent and pressed into shape. It has a beautiful dark finish.

The guitar sports a 19-fret rosewood fingerboard, mid-sized V-shaped mahogany neck, its original tuners and an elevated Bakelite pickguard.

     
A new bone nut replaced the original ebony one. On top is a silk-screened Kalamazoo logo on the rooftop peghead.

Brighter, deeper, louder than
its full-priced counterpart
The 14-3/8-inch lower-bout width and 4½-in. body depth of the KG-21 match the physical dimensions of a Gibson L-30 archtop. Despite the material differences (the KG-21 was mahogany bodied, while the L-30 was maple-bodied), today the sound of the budget-priced unit is brighter, deeper and louder — all hallmarks of the old-timey sound prized by contemporary musicians.
     

Ken Lelen and the Riggs 1937
KG-21, Oct 2011, at Overlook
Community in Charlton, Mass.
Songs performed on the Riggs
archtop included "Heartaches"
(© 1931) and "On A Slow Boat
To China" (© 1948).

Indeed, Vermont luthier Jake Wildwood described the sound of a mid-1930s Kalamazoo KG-21 he restored in 2013 as follows:

     
"The tone of this guitar is just what I like to hear: punchy, loud and gutsy, with a good creamy worth to its focused, mid-heavy tone," he said.

"These guitars make great backing-chord instruments in smaller swing and jazz groups, but also fit the bill for country, hillbilly and blues groups."

Ken Lelen and Riggs 1937 KG-21, April 2006, at
Cape May Village, Wilmington OH. Period songs
played on the Riggs archtop included "Somebody
Else Is Taking My Place" (© 1937), "The Glory Of
Love" (© 1936), and "We'll Meet Again" (© 1939).

_____________________________

©  2016 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved

Hank Peterson’s Kay Kraft

$19.95 archtop from Spiegel's 1937 mail-order catalog

__________________________________________

             ©  2016 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved

In April 1937, a month before graduating from high school in Saguache CO, Hank Peterson bought this Kay Kraft Style A guitar from the mail-order catalog of Spiegel Co. of Chicago.
     
Shipped in a soft case, later discarded, Hank spent $19.95 for this unusual mahogany-bodied, spruce-topped six-string. A round-hole archtop with adjustable neck, it had full-body a sunburst finish, pearloid headstock, 26-in. scale and gold leaf decals on pickguard and lower bouts.
     
Hank's guitar cost was big for 1937, but not as much as C.F. Martin’s cheapest spruce and mahogany archtop. A golden brown R-18 grand concert cost $55.
     
His guitar expense seemed large if you knew the price of other goods in the summer of 1937. For instance, Saliba's, a local grocery in Hank’s hometown, offered T-bone steaks for 30¢ a pound, pork chops at 40¢ a pound and hamburger for 20¢ a pound. Hart Mercantile offered men's work shoes ("sturdy build") at $1.98 and men's dress shirts at 88¢ each.

Jimmie Rodgers tunes and cowboy and western songs

Clarence Henry Peterson (1920 – 2010) was a self-taught musician. He learned to play guitar, ukulele and violin as a young man. Back in the day he liked to play guitar and sing Jimmie Rodgers hits, cowboy songs and some pop tunes.

     
“I got a chord book,” he said in November 2007 at a Vintage Music Concert for residents of Friendship Village in Dublin OH outside Columbus. The 353-unit retiree facility sits on the Scioto River near the corporate home of the Wendy's hamburger chain.

     
“Most of the sheet music of the day had [fingerings for] guitar and uke chords over the words,” Peterson said when he showed me his guitar after the concert. “That’s how I learned to play.”

     
Prior to owning this Kay Kraft he played “a cheap old guitar,” he recalled. “I can’t remember what I did with it, though I probably sold it for a song.”
     
He taught himself to play violin after he found one “hanging on a wall in a filling station while traveling out West." He later played the ukulele with friends at college. “We sang to the girls,” he said with a smile.

     
Besides the songs of Jimmie Rodgers ("The Singing Brakeman"), Hank liked cowboy ballads. “I liked those cowboy and western songs and thought I’d like to do that and ultimately learned a lot of them,” Peterson said. “Today, you can hum one of those old songs and I probably still know it.”

Clarence or Hank, but not Henry

As a youth Peterson traveled 50 miles round-trip every day to attend his high school. He was a popular student and elected president of his senior class of 13 students in October 1936. Just before Christmas of that year, he had a lead role in a romantic comedy. Two months later, in February 1937, he sang a character part in an operetta the school put on.

     
He was raised on his parent’s cattle ranch in Saguache County (1930 pop. 6,250) CO. Pronounced “sa-watch,” Saguache is a phonetic spelling of an Indian term for “water at the blue earth,” so named for dark clay found in the northern part of San Luis Valley west of Pueblo.

     
Throughout Peterson's youth he was called Clarence, not his middle name Henry, which he told me he did not like. Hank was thrust upon him sometime after graduation when he worked as a ranch hand and mechanic and October 1942 when he was inducted in the U.S. Army.

     
Following a three-year stint in the military during WW II as a mechanic in Austria, Hank studied mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He later moved to Columbus to marry Naomi Burk Peterson (1914 – 2002), his college sweetheart, and finish college at Ohio State University in Columbus. Before I met him, Hank had worked as a patent agent and lived his entire adult life in Upper Arlington, an affluent suburb of Columbus.

Buying Peterson's 70-year-old guitar

For an hour or so after my Friendship Village concert, Hank and I talked about life, travel, careers, old songs and old guitars. When I expressed interest in his guitar, he said that at 87 he'd decided it was time to let it go.
     
So, after some dickering, Hank said he'd sell his vintage Kay Kraft guitar to me. It cost $500 — more than I wanted to pay and less than what he thought it was worth.
     
The guitar was manufactured by Kay Musical Instruments of Chicago. It once had a blue and silver interior label visible in the sound hole. Most of it, however, was gone when I got the instrument.
     
The guitar has a lustrous tobacco sunburst finish on its spruce top, mahogany back and mahogany neck. A key design feature are decals on the lower bouts. They incorporate gold leaf vines with Indian heads that face each other on each side of the tailpiece. A similar decoration extends to the black pickguard.

   

Unlike other vintage arch tops, this guitar’s top and back are not carved. They were steam-bent into shape. Years ago it was an inexpensive way to make an arch. In addition, the guitar top is ladder-braced, not X-braced or fan-braced like other acoustics.
     
Peterson’s Kay Kraft was one of three round-hole archtop models offered during the late 1930s. Style A had back and sides of mahogany. Style B had back and sides of maple. Style C had back and sides of rosewood.
     
Guitar experts say Style A is the most common in today's vintage markets. Style C is the most desirable, while Style B is most rare.
     
The neck joint incorporates a patented sliding mechanism that sits between the neck joint and body (see photo below). It allows the player to adjust the height of the guitar's action. The highest set allows the player to turn the instrument into a slide guitar, while lower settings allow standard play.

     
To do this you loosen the strings and loosen a large wing nut found inside the body on the neck block. Then you tilt the neck to the desired angle, or set, re-tighten the wing nut and then re-tighten the strings.
     
It may sound simple, but the process is tedious. First, you make an adjustment to the neck, then tighten the strings. It is a pain if you have to check and re-check the neck angle a few times before you’re happy with the final set.

Round-hole archtop guitar
Hank's guitar was similar in most ways, including price, to the Venetian-shaped, round-hole archtop guitars (see catalog listing below) offered by Kay from the late 1920s through the mid-1930s. After that time, the firm adopted simpler, less expensive guitar designs.

     
Tonally, a round-hole archtop doesn't fit any mold because it's not like an F-hole archtop and it's not like a flat top. Its tonal character "straddles the line between nuanced lo-fi cool and cheap chic," according to luthier-dealer Mark Stutman of Folkway Music in Waterloo, Ontario.
     
Still, a round-hole archtop like Hank's offers period-music players the best of both worlds. It is a guitar with the punch, quickness and midrange of an archtop and the woody fatness of a flat top.
     
"It has a prominent muted warmth in the lower mids, chunky-toned upper mids, and a peanut-butter smooth response," Stutman said.

Page 33 in the Spiegel mail-order catalog of Christmas 1934 offered an
early iteration of Kay Kraft's round-hole archtop guitar at a base price of
$19.95. It had the pearlette headpiece, sunburst finish, gold leaf decals
on the lower bouts and pickguard, and Venetian-shaped body it offered
from the late-1920s through the mid-1930s. For the holidays Spiegel cut
the sale price by $2.

Selling Peterson's 70-year-old guitar
After only a few months I decided to sell the Peterson guitar. It wasn’t very loud and it didn’t hold up well to my flatpicking style.
     
By that time I began to realize few elderly audiences cared to see, hear or learn about vintage guitars — even beautiful, unusual period instruments with provenance like Hank's. Less talk, more music, they told me. Like concert-goers at today's rock and folk tribute shows, I found they just wanted to bathe in the nostalgic glow of familiar old songs.

     
So, in January 2008 Hank’s guitar was listed with Neil Harpe’s Stella Guitars (now defunct) in Annapolis MD. He recognized the Peterson guitar as a late 1930s Kay Kraft, a round-hole archtop with a conventional-shaped guitar body in excellent condition.
     
In his listing Harpe drew attention to the fact that the original owner had purchased the guitar at age 17 from the Spiegel catalog in May 1937. He took some photographs, valued the instrument at $1,800, and offered it for sale on his website with the new hard shell case I'd acquired for it.
     
In his listing Harpe identified most of the instrument’s all-original attributes:

     •  sunburst arched top

     •  gold leaf designs
     •  pearloid headstock

     •  mahogany back and sides

     •  15-inch lower bout width

     •  26-inch scale

     •  1¾-inch nut width

     •  patented Kay adjustable neck.

     
This transaction was a consignment sale. So, when it sold at $1,695 in June 2008, Harpe earned $339 — a 20% commission — not the 25% commission he heatedly demanded. Nevertheless, my net was a modest $836 — $1,356 minus the original investment of $500.
     
So now the Peterson Kay Kraft round-hole archtop guitar is once again out in the world — ready for cowboy and western songs.

                         _______________________________________________

                           ©  2016 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved