The 1910 Gibson F-4 with its lavishly detailed flower pot headstock inlay featured a new scroll 3-point design. His personal hallmark, included as an inlay on many of his early instruments, was an occult star-and-crescent. He also emphasized the importance of machines in precision manufacture. Orville Gibson was apparently obsessed with ornamentation, particularly the scroll. Though this design was subtly modified over the years, it clearly set the standard for what was to become the preferred style of mandolin used in American folk and popular music. Instead of having a flat or bent top and a bowlback, Orville’s new design was based on principles of violin construction, using a carved top and back. The 1905 Gibson A-4 was a revolutionary instrument in its time, breaking radically away from the traditional bowl-back instruments brought to America by Italian immigrants (disparagingly referred to as ‘taterbugs’). In 1902, a group of businessmen bought his patent, and formed the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Co., where Orville remained as a consultant, but not a partner, until 1915.
His early instruments were highly experimental and ornate. In 1898, he was granted a patent for a new design in arch-top instruments. He began designing and building instruments in the 1880s. Gibson was born in New York in 1856, and moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan as a young man. The Evolution Of The Modern Flat-Back Mandolin These artists appeared in concert halls, and vaudeville settings, performing ethnic, popular, and classical music.īy this time banjo, mandolin, and guitar clubs had become the rage among middle-class youth on college campuses and in towns and cities throughout the South, and a variety of playing styles– some of them borrowed from guitar techniques– were made widely available in instruction books and on the recordings of such popular urban musicians as Fred Van Eps and Vess Ossman. Attempting to beat the competition, the Gibson company sent field reps across America to encourage sales of mandolins, and to establish mandolin orchestras.įrom the turn of the century through the 1940s, a handful of American virtuoso mandolinists, mostly immigrants such as Bernardo Dapace, Samuel Siegal, Dave Apollon, and Giduanni Giouale, performed, recorded, composed, and arranged for the mandolin. From the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs, mandolins proliferated across the South. In 1900, a company called Lyon & Healy boasted ‘At any time you can find in our factory upwards of 10,000 mandolins in various stages of construction’. In 1897, Montgomery Ward’s catalog marveled at the ‘phenomenal growth in our Mandolin trade’.īy the turn of the century, mandolin ensembles were touring the vaudeville circuit, and mandolin orchestras were forming in schools and colleges. The mandolin was even among the first recorded instruments on Edison cylinders. A marked increase in Italian immigration in the 1880s sparked a fad for the bowl-backed Neopolitan instrument that spread across the land.
It was in vogue in the 1850s, when it shared the parlor with zithers, mandolas, ukuleles, and other novelties designed to amuse the increasingly leisured middle class.
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