nationals_eng

The Playmate of the Month

NATIONAL STYLE 0, 1933
NATIONAL TRIOLIAN, 1932

This time let's go back to the roarin' twenties. Music was reaching day after day a broader audience thanks to earliest records and grammophones, and an ever growing public wasn't anymore in need of going to a theatre to listen to artists play and sing, or to wait for the itinerant musicians of the minstrel shows. More music, and most of all, more music for everybody.

Still free from the ghost of the Depression, a strong and optimistic America was creating and listening to new musical languages, with deep popular roots (both balck and white), running towards technologic innovations which could keep up with people expectations and with artists' new expressive needs.

At the beginning of our story we find a young vaudeville musician, born in Texas in the earliest years of the past century, George Beauchamp. Heavy drinker and skilled hawaiian guitar player, Beauchamp was a creative mind with the special ability of understanding the needs of other musicians like him, who were struggling to make their instruments heard in an orchestral context. Reaching without effort both live audiences and recording microphones was his goal. Yes, banjo could do that, but after the '20s its harsh voice was not so popular anymore among ameirican listeners.
With this idea in mind, Beauchamp got in touch with brothers John and Rudy Dopyera, two czechoslovachian immigrants who in their 50th and Broadway Los Angeles workshop were building original-designed banjos with interesting and innovative modifications. The earliest result was a heavy walnut hawaiian guitar with a grammophone horn attached… There was a long way to go... long moths of sperimentation followed, and many protoypes were built with many different materials and designs. Finally, the first Patent for the trhee-cones guitar was obtained by John Dopyera in October 1926, soon followed by other patents which were coser to the resophonic design we all know. The single-cone guitar was breveted by Beauchamp in 1929.

In both cases, string vibrations was transferred through a wooden bridge placed on a circular “biscuit” to an aluminum cone of which the biscuit was the top, facing the guitar's back. This cone, vibrating exactly like a woofer in a loudspeaker, amplified the sound. The body itself, made of metal, exhalted volume, projection and definition.

And so National String Instrument Corporation was founded in 1927 by associates Beauchamp and Dopyera with Paul Barth and Ted Kleinmeyer. Sales success was immediate, thanks to the boom hawaiian music was living, with great artists (Sol Hoopii above all others) who drew from metal bodied Ntionals the sounds they are rememberd for until today. We all know the story of Company's inner disagreements, that led to the birth of Dobro (DOpyera BROthers) in 1929, but we'd rather insist on the musical facets of this story.

An unexpected support to resophonic guitars' diffusion came from the other America, not the one of the large dancing halls and dreaming atmospheres of hawaiian music, not the one of the enthusiasm for economic-boom soap-bubble, of Hollywood and Waikiki sands. National guitars became the voice of the America who used to travel in Greyhound's backseats and freight trains, who gathered in the juke joints on Saturday nights drinking bad bad whiskey and eating fried fish sandwiches after a long cotton-picking week. Black America, Blues' America.
Sure enough, the average blues player could not afford most elaborate Nationals such as Style 3 or Style 4, with three cones and rich engravings. But cheaper single-cone instruments like Duolians or Triolians were affordable enough to walk Delta roads and loud enough to cut-through barrell-houses shouting and streets noise. Son House, Bukka White and many more wrote legendary pages of the Devil's Music by sliding their bottlenecks on the strings of a Duolian, and other artist far from Delta style like Blind Boy Fuller sold many thousands of records playing both blues and ragtime on resophonics. Many of them played mostly at the street-cormers or in the open-air markets, and in week-end juke joint gigs. And in such noisy settings, National guitars gave their best, in the pre-electric guitar era.

In these pages you see two Nationals from the ’30s. Both have the same single-cone system, but they are made of different materials, which produce very distinctive sounds The Triolian is from 1932 and has a body made of painted steel, with stenciled hawaiian scenes on the back. The Style 0 was built in 1933 and is made of nickel-plated brass, with more elaborate sanded drawings both top and back . Notes' attack is much more emphasized on the Triolian, with a more brilliant and a bit harsh overall sound. The Style 0 stands half-way between cheaper steel-made resophonics and expensive nickel-plated brass bodied tricones, and has a sweeter sound with less attack and greter sustain. Both deliver much more volume than a regular guitar, and even today – immersed in the deafening sounds of Les Pauls and Marshalls - we can immagine the sensation created by these innovative instruments when they were introduced in the market.

The lack of truss rod (patented by Gibson a few years earlier) led the Company to build very thick and strong necks, and the player who likes to explore extra-slide territories with early resophonics will find some initial difficulties, also due to flat fingerboards with very small frets. Furthermore, it worths saying that it's rare to find old Nationals free from neck-bending problems caused by heavy strings used in the ’20s and ’30s. But if carefully selected, these guitars reveal an unique voice, which clearly tells of "blues and old", and which – for some alchemy unknown to this writer – you just don't find in the new beautiful reissues. Only suggestion? Maybe, but how many stories and how many venues, how much smoke and alcohol, how many emotions, laughs and tears have left their mark in the strong and true voice of these old guitars?