Resonator guitar
Maker
Dopyera Brothers
Date1978
Place MadeChicago, Illinois, United States, North America
Serial No.none
SignedRed and gold decal on the peghead: DOBRO / [lyre design]MarkingsPlastic piece screwed onto peghead: D / O / B / R / O
Stamped on the back of peg mechanism: GROVER / PAT. PEND. / U. S. A.
Stamped underneath the spider web resonator: 14
DescriptionPatented in 1927 by John Dopyera in Los Angeles, such instruments soon gave way to electric guitars, but single-cone, metal-body models like this caught on with blues players, while wood-body models found a home in country music and bluegrass. This example was made, as a gift for the donor, at the request of Olga Crow, an art dealer in Los Angeles, whose uncles were the Dopyera brothers. They had just retired, but found an old blank in their workshop and made this example, which she received at the end of April 1978.
Jozef Dopyera, a miller in Dolná Krupá by Trnava, Slovakia, was also a gifted musician who played a fiddle he made himself. His oldest son, Ján (John), born in Stráže in 1893, also built a fiddle in Dolná Krupá, but he and two of his brothers (there were ten children) moved to Los Angeles in 1908. In 1926, he patented his resophonic, steel-body guitar with three aluminum resonators, and, with his brothers, Rudi and Emil, and other investors, founded the National String Instrument Company, then separated and formed another company, Dopyera Brothers. The subsequent name, Dobro, was based on the first letter of DOpyera BROthers. John Dopyera died in 1988 in Grants Pass, Oregon.
DimensionsHeight: 970 mm (38 in)
Height of sides: 77 mm (3 1/8 in)
Width: 362 mm (14.25 in)
Vibrating string length: 623 mm (24.5 in)
ProvenancePreviously owned by Pamela D. Schmidt, Greeley, Colorado, who received it as a gift from her father, Wiliam Schmidt.
Published ReferencesTimothy D. Miller. The Origins and Development of the Pedal Steel Guitar. M.M. Thesis. Vermillion: University of South Dakota, 2007.
Credit LineGift of Pamela D. Schmidt and Western International Music, Inc., 2002
Object number10111
On View
On view
