Artist Award Guilds

[Taylor Martin Guild]

Can someone shed some light on these guitars for me.
I understand that John Denver had some of them.
What makes them different from other Guilds?

 

[Brad Little]

The Artist Award was an acoustic archtop guitar, the top of the line for Guild's archtop line. The "Artist Award" associated with John Denver was really an F-50 Rosewood with an Artist Award headstock and probably neck, although I'm not sure how much different the two necks are. They both have the same inlay, but at times the Artist Award had a different scale length. If I have a chance tomorrow I will compare the necks on my F-50 and Artist Award and see if I can tell much difference. It won't be 100% accurate as my F-50 has had some profiling of the neck, although very minor. You can see several pictures of the Denver guitar here:
http://www.jdgrs.com/guitars_detail.php?ID=23
You can see a good example of a vintage Artist Award here:
http://www.vintagemusic.fr/pict/GuildArtistAward.JPG
Brad

 

[pickoid]

Can someone shed some light on these guitars for me.
I understand that John Denver had some of them.
What makes them different from other Guilds?

TMG, have you seen John Denver's "Bighorn" TV special? I'd be surprised if you haven't. Anyway, there is tons of footage of the F-50 Special (the 6-string rosewood jumbo with the Artist Award headstock) in that video. He straps it to the back of a pack horse, in a soft leather case, and wanders all over creation with it in the middle of winter. There is a scene towards the beginning of the video where he unstraps the guitar from the horse after a particularly rough ride and just sort of grabs the neck and the body through the soft case to make certain they were still attached... Then, he and Tommy Tompkins make a raft out of felled trees (no more than 4 ft wide, just wide enough to get a good spread-legged stance on it) and he floats 25 miles down a river standing over the guitar ... Not the way most of us would treat our prized guitars.

I have seen photos of him playing that guitar everywhere from the top of a mountain to the deck of the Calypso research vessel. Obviously, to him that guitar was a tool to be used (Made to be Played, right?), and he used it very hard. One would think that the guitar would have sustained a lot of wear from all that abuse. My theory is, by about 1975 the guitar was ready to be retired from the road, which is when he started playing the Yamaha L-53 a lot. We know that it survived, because there are photos of it taken later, but it doesn't seem to have been used for concert tours, etc. And, it's possible of course that he had more than one of them.

At least one similar guitar has surfaced. It too is labeled F-50 Special. I have seen photos of it maybe on this forum, but definitely on the Acoustic Guitar Forum. It has double pickguards and is made of Brazilian rosewood. The headstock is weird. It has the same distinctive shape as the Artist Award model, but it does not have a normal Guild headstock overlay. Instead, it appears to have a bookmatched Brazilian rosewood headstock overlay, with no Guild logo or any ornamentation at all. There is no telling whether that is original or not. The link below is a shot of the headstock of that guitar. This is not my photo - the link is from a thread on the Acoustic Guitar Forum.

http://img164.imageshack.us/i/f5013xf.jpg/

 

[Taylor Martin Guild]

Thanks for the info on the guitar.
I had heard that an Artist Award was not an acoustic guitar but rather an arched top with pickups.
This is why I asked about the guitar that John played and some called an Artist Award.
It looks like most of John Denver's guitars were special order guitars with his specs added to them.
As I said before, as I have been watching some DVD's of John in concert, most of the time, he is playing the Yamaha guitars.
While they are beautiful guitars and sound very nice, they don't have that signature John Denver/Guild sound.

It's funny how some of us are as interested in the guitars as we are in the artists themselves.
I know that I'm guilty of it.
I guess that I just have a love for good guitars.

 

[William63]

Thanks for the info on the guitar.
I had heard that an Artist Award was not an acoustic guitar but rather an arched top with pickups.
This is why I asked about the guitar that John played and some called an Artist Award.
It looks like most of John Denver's guitars were special order guitars with his specs added to them.
As I said before, as I have been watching some DVD's of John in concert, most of the time, he is playing the Yamaha guitars.
While they are beautiful guitars and sound very nice, they don't have that signature John Denver/Guild sound.

It's funny how some of us are as interested in the guitars as we are in the artists themselves.
I know that I'm guilty of it.
I guess that I just have a love for good guitars.

I am HUGE John Denver fan and he got me into both Guild, Taylor and Yamaha guitars.

Here is a pic of him playing his F50 special a couple of years before he died.



I do beleive that he stopped playing this guitar on stage in 1975 and the last I saw him use it was in a 1983 TV special with the Muppets called Rocky Mountain Holiday where he takes all the Muppet on a camping trip. It is on DVD.

So from the picture and the DVD maybe that guitar became his beater or camping guitar?

 

[GardMan]

Looking thru Hans' book, it appears the AA began as the "Johnny Smith Award" model... an archtop with floating pickup. After the agreement between Guild and Smith ended (apparently, Smith never accepted the final production design due to some disagreement about the final construction... see Hans' book), the model was renamed the "Artist Award," and continued as a top-of-the-line archtop. Some of the wording in Hans' book (2nd figure legend on p148) leads me to believe that it could be ordered w/ or w/o the pickup... but that may be my misinterpretation of Hans' phraseology.

JD's guitar was an F50R w double pickguards and an AA headstock. Hans has one small pic of it in his book, p164, in the section on special orders.

 

[William63]

Looking thru Hans' book, it appears the AA began as the "Johnny Smith Award" model... an archtop with floating pickup. After the agreement between Guild and Smith ended (apparently, Smith never accepted the final production design due to some disagreement about the final construction... see Hans' book), the model was renamed the "Artist Award," and continued as a top-of-the-line archtop. Some of the wording in Hans' book (2nd figure legend on p148) leads me to believe that it could be ordered w/ or w/o the pickup... but that may be my misinterpretation of Hans' phraseology.

JD's guitar was an F50R w double pickguards and an AA headstock. Hans has one small pic of it in his book, p164, in the section on special orders.

In his book Hans calls JD's guitar an F50 special and not an F50R so I wonder was that a mistake or was it really an F50 special and not an F50R with the "special" being that is was made with rosewood and not maple?

 

[GardMan]

Hans would be the one to answer... but the F-50R was introduced in '65, so I wouldn't think the "special" moniker would apply to the wood... unless JD's guitar predates that (the bridge on JD's seems more typical of a late-60s early 70s bridge). So, I would expect "special" refers to the double pickguards and AA headstock, which would be special orders. Don't know why they wouldn't call it an "F-50R special," tho'.

 

[David R.C.]

Hi, just noticed these threads as I was looking for an F50R Artist award. I went to the States from the UK in 1978 with my F512R and F50R guitars having had trouble at home getting them set up correctly. I met the then-director Neil Lillian of Guild in Elizabeth NJ in 1978. He told me at that time, the artist award that JD played was one of a very limited number and if my memory serves me right, he said 6, and one went to The Grateful Dead. He further said JD came into his office one day saw it and took it away with him. That is as much as I know. First hand that is. Who is the Hans person talked about on here sorry to be ignorant of this person?

 

[dreadnut]

I played a vintage AA at Elderly Instruments one time, and I just didn't bond with it. But I'm kind of an acoustic purist.

 

[David R.C.]

Not sure what you mean by "purist" I have played many acoustic guitars and they are all (sometimes even the same model when you go up the price range), very individual, and, almost like people, they are their own person as it were.
I'd perhaps, understand your purist statement as you like certain characteristics of certain models or makers maybe.

 

[Rambozo96]

I thought an LTG’er sold one on here earlier this year. Highly collectible I’m sure. Bob Weir had one

 

[adorshki]

Hi, just noticed these threads as I was looking for an F50R Artist award. I went to the States from the UK in 1978 with my F512R and F50R guitars having had trouble at home getting them set up correctly. I met the then-director Neil Lillian of Guild in Elizabeth NJ in 1978. He told me at that time, the artist award that JD played was one of a very limited number and if my memory serves me right, he said 6, and one went to The Grateful Dead. He further said JD came into his office one day saw it and took it away with him. That is as much as I know. First hand that is. Who is the Hans person talked about on here sorry to be ignorant of this person?

HI David, welcome aboard!

Hans Moust is the author of the Guild Guitar Book and member here and one of if not the world's foremost expert on vintage Guilds. He interviewed many of "the old hands" while researching the book, and even has production records from Westerly and lots of insights as to how things were done there.

Your recollection coincides with other reports of those "F50R Specials" over the years, including the "batch of 6" with at least one going to Bob Weir. (6 pieces also happened to be their standard "batch" size, so the number makes sense from that perspective too)

I first read it here:
https://letstalkguild.com/ltg/index.php?threads/bob-weir-and-his-guild-f50.185399/page-2

Don't recall ever hearing that JD "saw it and took it away with him", but fits with other artist endorsement stories we've heard here.

Good luck with your search!

 

[SFIV1967]

Who is the Hans person talked about on here sorry to be ignorant of this person?

Welcome to LTG! See:

GuitarsGalore

Amazon.com

Ralf

 

[adorshki]

Not sure what you mean by "purist" I have played many acoustic guitars and they are all (sometimes even the same model when you go up the price range), very individual, and, almost like people, they are their own person as it were.
I'd perhaps, understand your purist statement as you like certain characteristics of certain models or makers maybe.

Yeah think he must have meat meant "Flattop purist" since an AA's an acoustic, too, except it's an archtop. The pickup's an "accessory" for that guitar, really. Guitar doesn't need it for optimum sound quality, only for extra volume when desired.

 

[dreadnut]

OK, well the unplugged tone on the one I played was not very good.

 

[Russell Letson]

I've never seen "Artist Award" applied officially to any Guild other than the top archtop, which was aimed at competing with the top models from Gibson and Epiphone. They're basically even-fancier versions of the previous top-model A-500. And in my decades of paying attention to who-plays-what and in-what-context, I can't recall ever seeing an AA in the rhythm section of a big band--they show up in the hands of soloists working in small groups and rarely in all-acoustic settings.

I took several workshops with Steve Abshire (now-retired guitarist with the Navy's Commodores big band), whose main guitar was an AA, which he sometimes played unamplified, but usually through its stock DeArmond floating pickup. Sounded like this unamplified (Steve takes the third solo):



BTW, I took classes from all three, all really fine players. Steve's AA is set up with low action for electric playing (you can hear the fret slap), while Tom Mitchell's Eastman is set up higher for acoustic work.

And like this amplified:

 

[David R.C.]

Does anybody know any guitar makers who could and would make an Artist Award D55N ?

 

[SFIV1967]

Does anybody know any guitar makers who could and would make an Artist Award D55N ?

What exactly would that be? A D-55 body with an Artist Award neck and nylon strings?

Ralf

 

[David R.C.]

No steel strings but a D55 body