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C. F. Martin & His Guitars, 1796-1873.

Article Excerpt
C. F. Martin & His Guitars, 1796-1873. By Philip F. Gura. Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. [xix, 250 p. ISBN 0-8708-2801-7. $45.] Illustrations, color plates, glossary, bibliographic references, index.

The name C. F. Martin conjures up images of pre-World War II era guitars now worth thousands of dollars. The Martin Company's twentieth-century guitars have reigned supreme in many forms of American popular music, but most modern performers and collectors are only vaguely aware of the nineteenth-century origins of the company. Martin guitars from this early period are not generally the ones sought after by performers, although collectors may find such instruments more appealing after the publication of the present work. Philip F. Gura's new book on the founder of the Martin empire, Christian Frederick Martin (1796-1873), delves into a side of American musical history and of the guitar that is almost totally unexplored, and gives us a portrait of a master craftsman and businessman.

The first chapter is the only weak one in the book, primarily because of an overreliance on such outdated and notoriously fallible secondary sources as Philip J. Bone's The Guitar and Mandolin: Biographies of Celebrated Players and Composers (London: Schott & Company, 1954). Such sources are prone to be overly zealous in their evaluation of the guitar's importance in history and lack an overall perspective of the repertoire. For example, Ferdinando Carulli's L'harmonie appliquee a la guitare (Paris: Petit, 1825) was certainly not the first method to focus on the guitar as an accompaniment instrument...

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