1907 K. Luauii Hawaiian Guitar

1907 K. Luauii Hawaiian Guitar
	by Tom Noe* and Gregg Miner, as part of*

The story of this instrument - which is all but conclusive proof of a Hawaiian origin for the famous slope-shouldered hollow-neck lap steel acoustic guitars – is presented here by Tom Noe – GM

"In the early 90s when I was looking for Weissenborns and general information on early Hawaiian instruments, I had a Unix account at work, and I got involved in a chatroom discussion on alt.guitars.acoustic about these instruments. A fellow in Chicago told me that he had a Weissenborn, and also a Hawaiian-made guitar that was in pretty bad shape that he had found in an attic somewhere. That certainly piqued my interest, and so I talked him into sending me photos, which he did (Tom is now sharing these photos with us. They are ten-year-old Polaroids, and the instrument's colors have since turned blue – GM).

The guitar is a dark brown, which I now believe to be koa wood. The guitar looks like a Hilo, with the shape that we all recognize, but is much cruder. It has absolutely no frets of any kind, not even any markers - real strange! The bridge is an adjustable bridge, sort of like you find on Gibson mandolins with two adjustment wheels. The strings pass over it to the stamped metal tailpiece (rather than a pin bridge). The label in this early instrument is a printed square RAO Strings (Wm Lewis & Sons, Chicago) label with the typewritten legend:

"Hand Made: 1907 K. Luauii"

The Luaui guitar coupled with information found elsewhere that Nunes or one of the other ukulele makers made full-size Hawaiian guitars before 1910 led us to believe that the Hawaiians came up with the general design. It could be that Knutsen saw one of these instruments at either the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, or the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. Something about the Hawaiian guitar really impacted Knutsen early on and it wasn't just the music. These guitars would be easy to make, and we know that indigenous koa wood was available at the AYPE.

Also, Knutsen did come up with the idea of convertible instruments which he tried to patent in that early time frame. If the design was his, we would have seen a design patent like he had for the harp guitars. The weight of evidence simply does not favor creation of the design by Knutsen. So we were careful in the book to say that while Knutsen no doubt was the first mainland manufacturer of Hawaiian guitars, the Hawaiians probably predated Knutsen in the design."

Tom further explained that this information was left out of the book because:

"We felt that without being able to inspect the actual instrument, it would have been irresponsible of us to use an unauthenticated instrument. But...it is there. It was the subject of much conversation between Dan and myself, and we tried to find out when RAO Strings and Wm Lewis and Sons were in business. I remember hauling the photo around with me when I did trademark searches and so forth.

While the Luauii guitar provides evidence of early Hawaiian-made guitars (the only one we have found so far), it can't be the only one out there!"

With the instant editablilty of the web site (should corrections or retractions become necessary), I didn’t think it would be irresponsible to provide this information now. The more we post and postulate, the more we’ll hopefully bring out of the woodwork! - GM

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