1951 Bigsby Mandolin

UPDATE: As of December 12, 2014, this Bigsby Mandolin is for sale at Retrofret and it’s priced at $42,000. Click here to see the original lsiting.

Bigsby is best known these days for the vibrato unit that bears his name, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s he was the go-to builder for county music’s hottest pickers. Merle Travis, Grady Martin, Billy Byrd and mandolinist Tiny Moore were just a few of the players who had Paul Bigsby build custom instruments for them. We don’t know the exact number of guitars Bigsby made but we do know he made a small handful of mandolins, of which six have turned up, so far. This mandolin was made in 1951 for a radio DJ named Johnny Muessig. We don’t know what sort of music he played on it, but since pretty much all of the other musicians who played Bigsbys played country or western swing, it’s pretty safe to assume that Muessig did as well.

Muessig’s mandolin has ten strings, two more than a standard mandolin. Usually in this setup the extra pair is tuned down to C, which actually makes it a sort of mandola/mandolin hybrid. It also has custom wound pickups with five pole-pieces, a very unusual configuration, even today. Happily, Bigsby was a skilled craftsman who was equally at home working in wood or metal, which made it simple to make parts like these from scratch. Bigsby instruments rarely come up for sale but during the rare times that they do, they sell for fortune. (The last Bigsby guitar to sell at auction went for almost $250,000 and there are rumors of them changing hands privately even more than that.) This mandolin is scheduled to be auctioned by Heritage Auctions on February 15 with an opening bid of $20,000, but it will most likely go for much more than that.

Click here to see the auction listing.

For more info on Paul Bigsby’s instruments, check out Deke Dickerson’s site, The Bigsby Files.