1928 Gibson L-1 Acoustic Guitar
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GUEST:
I picked it up at auction. Wasn't really looking for anything in particular that night. It came up on stage, they asked ten dollars, and I bid, I got it.
APPRAISER:
For ten dollars?
GUEST:
For ten dollars. I knew Gibson as far as the name, but I didn't know anything about "The Gibson," so I really don't know anything about it.
APPRAISER:
When did you go to this auction? What was the date?
GUEST:
It's probably been six to eight months ago.
APPRAISER:
So a pretty recent acquisition.
GUEST:
Yeah.
APPRAISER:
It's a 1928 guitar. That's as close as we could figure out when it was. The back and sides on this guitar are mahogany. It's a spruce top, and the finish is what they call a sunburst finish. So this is one of the better models. The way you date this guitar is the bracing on the inside is a pattern they call an H-bracing. So when Gibson switched from making the old style arch top guitars to the flat top guitars as they were developing their bracing system, the first iterations were the H-brace and the last iteration was what they call the X-brace, which they use up until today. The model is an L-1, but over the years it's been called the Robert Johnson model. Robert Johnson was a very famous blues musician in the South, and very few photographs of Robert Johnson, very few recordings of him, but you see Robert Johnson with a very similar guitar to this. The thing to make it a Robert Johnson guitar is you see the rounded lower bout and the shape of the bridge: the rectangular bridge with the extra raised area in the front of it. This has been modified slightly-- it has a bone saddle that's been put into it-- but they did it nicely. I think a guitar like this, Gibson guitar made in the late '20s from Kalamazoo, Michigan, would bring somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000 in a retail market.
GUEST:
Oh, my gosh. Wonderful!
APPRAISER:
So I'm going to start going to the auction with you.
GUEST:
Yeah, I think I'll go back. That's fantastic!
APPRAISER:
You always go back to the same fishing hole where you catch the big one, right?
GUEST:
Exactly.
Appraisal Details
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