Bigsby Electric Tenor Guitar Owned and played by Smokey Stoltenberg Electric Guitar (1949), ser. #10149, original black hard shell case.

Bigsby Electric Tenor Guitar Owned and played by Smokey Stoltenberg Model Tenor Guitar (1949), made in Downey, CA, serial # 10149, natural lacquer finish, laminated maple body, maple neck with rosewood fingerboard, original black hard shell case.

We have handled numerous rare and special instruments, but this 1949 4-string electric tenor guitar ranks especially high on both counts. It is an early handmade product of Paul "P.A" Bigsby, built in the first year of his selling guitars on a commercial basis. Each was unique to the individual customer, handmade in his small garage on Phlox street in Downey, California and as the sole Bigsby brochure put it "Sold Only Directly To The Player".

Bigsby is an American legend, one of THE most important contributors to the early development of the electric guitar and the pedal steel. The vibrato unit he designed in the early 1950s was adopted by Gretsch, Gibson, Guild, Harmony, Magnatone, Kay and others. It is still widely used today, the Bigsby name emblazoned on countless thousands of guitars made since the early 1950s.

Before that in the late 1940's that P.A. hand built flashy electric instruments and customized existing guitars for the southern California "hillbilly" music community. He was friendly with the top players in the area and exchanged ideas with both Leo Fender and Les Paul. Early Bigsby guitars were made for and used by Merle Travis, Grady Martin, Smokey Rogers, Butterball Page, Billy Byrd (who received one designed for Jimmy Bryant) and Hank Garland. When these prominent hot players began featuring Bigsbys he soon had a waiting list two to four years long. A Bigsby instrument was a mark of distinction, a cowboy Cadillac among musicians.

This is a particularly unusual Bigsby instrument, one of the VERY few 4-string tenor guitars he ever built. It is stamped 10149 on the back edge of the body indicating Bigsby finished it out October 1st, 1949. This Guitar is pictured in the book "The Story Of Paul Bigsby" by Andy Babuik on page 107 but mis-dated; it is noted as being stamped 4-01-49 instead of the

correct 10-1-49. This was due to the first digit being largely covered by The small string-holding plate just above the tailpiece.

This timing is interesting as it shows several important instruments completed within a matter of weeks, this one sitting in between the Smoky Rogers (dated 9-27) and the Bryant/Byrd guitar (10-7). This indicates that Bigsby was likely working on multiple instruments at the same time; later he would confine himself to building one single instrument per month.

All Bigsby guitars are extremely rare; Tenor models especially so. Bigsby built a single-pickup tenor for his friend Eschol Cosby, but beyond that this twin-pickup 4-string is practically unique. It is not known WHO it was originally built for, but it was acquired directly from P. A. Bigsby sometime in the 1950s by Smokey Stoltenberg, a hot western swing player based in northern California who kept it the rest of his life. The family story is Bigsby complained the orphan 4-string had been hanging around the shop for a long time waiting for a buyer after the original customer failed to pay for it!

This tenor is built to same basic design and construction as the guitar built for Grady Martin in 1949 referred to by collectors as the "Standard "or "Catalog" style pictured in Bigsby's brochure. The natural-finished body has a swooping lower cutaway and an upper lump scroll, not solid but semi hollow built around a neck-extension centerpiece with extensive bracing. The top and back are 3-ply veneered with the spectacular bird's eye maple Bigsby favored. Both edges are bound with single layer celluloid.

The very thin 4-string neck is a single piece of maple with a spliced-on treble headstock side. The neck heel is artfully faired into the body, a Bigsby trademark. The bound rosewood fingerboard has pearl block inlay instead of the more common Bigsby playing card pattern. The walnut facing on the scrolled single-sided headstock bears the inlaid "Bigsby" with no dot in the "I", typical of his earliest builds. The tuners are early Kluson Deluxes, the baseplates not clipped as only four of them are fitted.

The twin 4-pole single coil pickups were handwound by P. A. Bigsby, housed in milled aluminum covers drilled for 6 poles with screws filling the outside holes. Many who have heard them consider Bigsby pickups among the finest ever made. Wiring consist of a three-way pickup selector mounted to an aluminum plate and two control knobs. At some point the guitar was wired with two discreet jacks, one for each pickup. There is no tone control, both knobs are volumes; oddly the upper controls the treble pickup while the lower acts on the bass unit. While "Stereo" guitars were years in the future when this tenor was built, Western Swing scholar Deke Dickerson informs us that Junior Barnard's Epiphone was wired this way when he played with Bob Wills and this may have been done when the guitar was fairly new. Some of the wire appears later but the original large-can IRC pots are still in place, dated to the 39th week of 1948.

Other fittings include Bigsby's early-pattern wooden "fiddle" tailpiece glued to the top and a narrow 4-string cast aluminum bridge on a small wooden base. An odd feature is a small metal bracket on the back rim holding two ballends so those lower strings run through the bridge and are secured back at the rim. We have never seen this before; it may have been done for sonic reasons or simply to reduce tension of the heavier strings on the wooden tailpiece. We would guess this was not original to when Bigsby built the guitar, but it's hard to say for sure. The strap attachment points are simple aluminum loops for dog clips, another Bigsby trademark.

Smokey Stoltenberg was born on September 2, 1914, in Kiowa County, Oklahoma. He played tenor guitar in Western swing bands from the 1930s on including Ray Wade and the Rhythm Riders. During the war, Smokey was sent by the musicians’ union to Concord, California, to fill in as guitarist in Jim Webb’s country western band. Webb was dubious seeing Smokey arrive with a tenor guitar, but that vanished once he heard him play. This began a lifelong musical friendship between the two. It was through Webb that Smokey learned of a tenor guitar hanging on Bigsby’s shop wall he had made for a guy who didn’t pay him. Since it was a tenor, nobody else wanted it, but Smokey bought the guitar and kept it until he died.

This Bigsby has been in the Stoltenberg family since he acquired it, not publicly seen since last gigged in the 1950s! Today original instruments hand-built by Paul Bigsby have achieved holy grail status. Practically all known examples are in private or museum collections from which