Gallagher Guitars | From the pages of Acoustic Musician

From the pages of Acoustic Musician
July 1995 - Pages 16-20
By JOHN CALLOW

"...well, Gallagher guitars just suit my ears, to make it short." -Doc Watson

Doc Watson remembers the first time he met J.W. Gallagher and his son Don. "In 1968, I believe it was, Don and his dad came by here. They'd been to Union Grove and they came by our house. J.W. had a couple or three Gallagher guitars - no, I believe it was four. I tried all of 'em, and there was one named 'Ol' Hoss,' that I decided I liked better than any of them."

Ol' Hoss, the Gallagher G-50 (serial # 68001) Watson played on the historic Will the Circle Be Unbroken sessions with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, is now in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

"That thing made some mighty fine recordings... Yes, that's the guitar. It really had a good tone, I thought. It sounded so good. And, well, Gallagher guitars just suit my ears, to make it short."

Suiting the ears of players is what J.W. Gallagher & Son of Wartrace, Tennessee, has been about for 30 years, says Don Gallagher.

"Our guitars have a distinctive, characteristic sound. That's not an accident."

J.W. got his first taste of guitar building during a stint with Slingerland Drum Company in nearby Shelbyville.

"Slingerland decided to make guitars so they came over here and talked with Dad about setting up a production line, " Don remembers. "That was in the spring of 1963. The Shelby was a plywood guitar aimed at the student market. It kind of ran against my father's grain.

"He came back to Wartrace in the spring of 1965 and, not too long after that, we built Number 1, a G-50 - 'G' for Gallagher and '50' because my dad was 50 when he built it."

Work on the Shelby project may not have satisfied the craftsman in J.W. Gallagher, but it did contribute one lasting symbol to guitar posterity: the French-scroll headstock which has become the Gallagher trademark.

"We were playing around with different ideas. We were looking for something distinctive and easily recognized, yet conservative and tasteful," Don recalls. The actual inspiration for the French scroll came from the pattern in a paisley dress Don's grandmother wore.

"The design has changed some over the years. It's much more compact than it was then. The headstock is shorter and more compact and now has a distinctive break at the shoulders," Don says.

The headstock isn't the only thing which has changed since 1965.

"From 1965 to 1970, there were quite a few changes, mostly in bracing patterns. Those guitars are distinctively different. From then to now, there's been a constant progression, visually, as well as tonally. We have #1 and #1,000 on display here in the shop. There's a world of difference."

The sound has been adjusted from time-to-time, using feedback from people who play the instruments, people like Doc Watson and Steve Kaufman.

"If people know anything about guitars, they know about Gallaghers," Kaufman says, "I own three now and have had five."

For the last two years, a G-72 Special cutaway, customized at the factory with a seventh string, has been his instrument of choice on the road.

"I wonder what some of these we're making now are going to sound like in 20 years," Don says, "I know the new ones are better now than the ones we built, say, in 1968 were when they were first made."

Gallagher says the sound is better, but what about a real expert on the Gallagher sound?

"I have a cutaway," Doc Watson says, "that might be - I said might be - better than Ol' Hoss was. I don't know. There's something about that first Gallagher I had that I loved."

Both Kaufman and Watson will tell you, though, the guitars are not the whole Gallagher story.

"J.W. said, 'Doc, there's no strings attached to that guitar but the ones that's on it.' He said, 'I don't ask for a full endorsement, just a letter of recommendation if you like the guitar.' So I kept it and played it.

"I didn't have any trouble [writing that letter]. Don probably has a copy of it somewhere."

The letter is framed and hangs on the wall in Wartrace.

"I remember J.W. and Hazel being the sweetest couple," Kaufman says. "The world stopped when you got there. I can remember in Kansas, they'd both have a booth and Mr. Gallagher would say, 'Oh, come sit down,' and he'd give you his chair."

The G-72 Special that Kaufman won at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, is named 'Hazel' in honor of Hazel Brannon, Don's mother and J.W.'s widow.

"He was a wonderful, warm-hearted person," Watson says. "I really thought the world of him. He was just jovial, a good friend to be around, to talk to... . You enjoyed a handshake with the man."

And he wasn't that way just with his well-known clients like Watson and Kaufman, Hazel says. "He met a lot of interesting people - that focus on individual people was his from the start. There's no telling how many meals I've cooked for people who were down at the shop visiting around dinnertime. Back in the '60s, we had a lot of hitchhikers come through, and he'd just bring 'em down to the house."

Doing business with J.W. Gallagher & Son hasn't changed since he bought his first Gallagher, Kaufman says.

"The personality of a company is important to me. If I had to call from Seattle, Don would be right there with me. Eastern Airlines broke my first G-72, and he slapped a new neck on fast so I could get back playing.

"All the comments I make about Gallagher guitars, I do because I want to. I don't endorse them; I stand behind them."

"Don has that kind of reputation all across the industry," says Bob Redford, the organizer of the Walnut Valley Festival.

A Gallagher G-72 Special has been one of the prizes at Winfield since 1978. Kaufman has picked up two of them.

"It took us a few years to get on Don's list," Redford says. "He has been superb to deal with and he's been very creative in suiting the customers."

One of the customers who knows about the Gallagher waiting list is Doyle Petty, a parlor picker from Nashville. Doyle got the last Gallagher of 1994, a Doc Watson model.

"I order it in March and got it in December. The wait was worth it, though. Absolutely. Any guitar that sounds like mine does new, I can't imagine what it'll be like when it gets some age on it."

Petty is on the waiting list again this year, this time for an A-70 he's giving to his wife for her birthday.

"The waiting list is about six months right now, which is optimal," Don says. "It lets us feel comfortable. We've been as far behind as a year, but that's too long."

Another Gallagher customer is Glen Buckner, a Jackson, Georgia, restauranteur.

"I haven't got but about a dozen, right now. I had a few more but I've given some away."

That Buckner has a dozen Gallaghers is all the more remarkable since fewer than 2,300 have been produced since 1965. A review of ads for vintage guitars in a recent trade publication came up with hundreds of Martins and Gibsons, and two Gallaghers.

Among the guitars in Buckner's collection are a G-45 and a G-50 - both made in 1968 - a new Ragtime Special, and a G-72 Special he bought from a Winfield winner. Buckner also owns a G-71.

"That G-71 is special. Don made it out of his last piece of Brazilian rosewood. He showed it to me while he was making it, and I said, 'Can't you sell it to me?' He changed the subject - he'll deny this, but it's the truth. But, finally, he said he'd be glad to, just don't push him because he was by himself. I kept true to my word and didn't call him but three or four times a month until it was ready."

Don was by himself because of a crisis which nearly put him out of business in 1987 and 1988.

"When EPA mandated changes in the way lacquers could be made, our supplier changed the formulation. In so doing, the elasticity characteristics changed. We weren't the only ones affected. Martin had the same problem because we were using the same stuff."

The problem surfaced when a customer called and told Don the finish on his new guitar was beginning to crack. Gallagher checked the instruments in his finishing room and found similar problems. He called a halt to production while he searched for an answer.

"We were down for well over a month while the company analysed the formula. The vinyl sealer was misformulated, they said, but I had three months of guitars with bad finishes and nothing to finish them with."

In January 1988, Gallagher laid off his staff.

"I couldn't keep playing games. It was costing too much and destroying the reputation of the guitar. We were down until March, talking with the supplier, trying other things.

"I spent all of 1988 working by myself, stripping down guitars and refinishing them. There were over 40 in the finishing room when we discovered the problem."

The rumor started that Gallagher was out of business.

"I had orders to fill but i refused to take new orders until I took care of my obligation to the people we'd already shipped guitars to."

The supplier's local representative finally suggested an alternative which worked. The new formula not only works, Gallagher says it's better.

"It seems to have enough hardness that it doesn't mar easily," he said.

Each Gallagher gets nine coats of lacquer over a three-day period and is sanded between each coat.

"The final finish is very thin, but all the pits in the wood are filled, which is what you're wanting. The standard lacquer finish is a necessary evil to protect the wood and to serve as a moisture barrier. The thinner we can get it and still do that, the better."

The sound of the Gallagher has changed over the years because of input from the people who play them. So has the Gallagher line, Don says.

"Our first guitar was the G-50, which is a dreadnought. I guess the first big name we built a guitar for was Peter Yarrow. He wanted a 12-fret neck with rosewood and the big body but designed for silk and steel strings. We built the first G-70M for him."

The Gallaghers built their first grand concert-size instrument in 1968.

"Ramona Jones wanted to give one to Grandpa for Christmas. We designed it, built it, and finished it on Christmas Eve. Dad called Ramona, and she said she had a pot of soup on and to come on up and have dinner with them."

The Ragtime special was designed for a Knoxville customer who wanted to play jazz.

"We've been doing more lately in fingerstyle guitars with smaller bodies. Sometimes I'll have an idea and I'll sell it to someone and incorporate it into our designs."

Don and Kaufman are working together on one of those ideas, a modification to 'Hazel.'

"We're going to set the neck angle more like an archtop. I'm looking forward to hearing what happens. Since it was built in 1978, we have a good baseline for judging the sound.

"This year, I'd like to do a couple of classicals. An archtop may be something in the future. I've had more and more people asking about them."

Don's mother says J.W. would be proud of the work his younger son is doing. (The other Gallagher son, Bill, is a chemical engineer in Fort Worth. He does play a Gallagher guitar.)

"J.W. was a craftsmen," Hazel says, "I don't think anybody has ever enjoyed anything any more than he enjoyed making guitars. I think he would tell you these are good as any guitar we've ever made."

"When we started, we approached it from a woodworking standpoint," Don says. "We had no more idea about Martin or Gibson than anything. We stopped making the D-17 because we became aware of the Martin D-18.

"Dad would recognize the shop - that hasn't changed much since we started - but I'd have to explain a lot. There's 'The Guitar,' then there are the nuances, and that's what has changed."

What hasn't changed at all in 30 years is a commitment to craftsmanship and tone.