My Gosden Weissenborn Guitar

Many of us became aware of these strange instruments for the first time when Ben Harper emerged on the scene a few years ago, but many of us had heard David Lindley playing one years before on Jackson Browne albums. The design is from Herman Weissenborn who made these from about 1920-1930, mostly of Koa wood from Hawaii. The craze for Hawaiian music probably started from the presence of Hawaiian musicians at the "Great Exhibition" of 1915, in San Francisco. These were the predecessors of the Resonator instruments from National and Dobro which probably killed them off. I'd been playing some bottleneck blues way back, and also took up Dobro when I fell into the bluegrass fraternity. I became aware of these guitars but hadn't really thought much about getting one, until I saw this one hanging on the wall at The Acoustic Music Company - in Brighton UK. www.theacousticmusic co.co.uk back in 2007. I was feeling flush and so we did a deal. I had no idea what to do with it, or how to tune it but a little googling gave me some basic info, and I as my Dobro was in GBDGbd, and my National was in DADF#ad, I decided on CGCGce. It was later that I discovered that the luthier who built it lived in the area so I visited him to have a new nut fitted and he later replaced the bridge - not because there was a problem but he had developed a better style and fitted it for free. He built this one in 2004. I formed a couple of duo partnerships playing old 20s-30s style stuff with not a little influence from Leon Redbone, and they gave me the opportunity to lay Dobro, mandolin and this beast. I confess that it doesn't see the light of day much nowadays, but its always fun to take yourself out of your comfort zone a bit. As far as I know Peter Gosdon still makes instruments and his website is : www.petergosden.com