Had a fun trip yesterday to meet Merlene Travis at Norman’s Rare Guitars to help shed some backstory on a guitar that was owned by her father, Merle Travis. The guitar is a 1929 Martin O-18 that Merle obtained somewhere around the time (1937) that he joined the WLW Boone County Jamboree radio show in Cincinnati and joined the Drifting Pioneers group there.
I’m not sure how much Merle played this guitar professionally, although there is a photo of him playing it as his hillbilly alter ego, “Possum Gossett.” Merle began soliciting his colleagues to scratch their autographs on the guitar; and he kept adding autographs throughout his career—the late 1930s and early 1940s in Cincinnati at WLW; the 1940s and 1950s in California as a Capitol Records hitmaker; the 1960s and 1970s in Nashville as a Country Music Hall of Fame member and frequent Grand Ole Opry performer.
It’s fun as a historian (and the guy who wrote the Merle Travis biography) to see all these names that played heavily in Merle’s career, and fringe showbiz names too. You could play country music trivia with this guitar and stump most people. The more you look, the more autographs pop out at you. It’s a great thing to see, and amazing that it survived all these years.
I think the guitar is heading to Kentucky, where it will be displayed at the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame at Renfro Valley. Good to see Merlene and Alan and Norm and all the folks working there at the shop; I brought along Evelyn and Roscoe, and they enjoyed it too.
Now see how many country music names, both famous and obscure, you can pick out that are scratched into the top of this guitar!
See more photos at Deke’s original Facebook post!
