Bill Monroe & Gibson F5 Sales Question

[Chris Gray]

I was watching a Monroe documentary the other night and Bill mentioned how his music helped Gibson sell a lot of mandolins.

If that's true wouldn't you see a lot more 50's - 70's Gibson F5's?

[Elliot Luber]

Don't have a very specific answer, though the experts here are likely to, but if there would be no Bluegrass music without Bill Monroe, than you have to figure F5s would not be all that popular. Since Bill did a lot to create BG, you have to guess he helped make the F5 what it is today.

[rcc56]

That's a good question. A lot of it has to do with what was popular during that time period, and what was going on with Gibson.

Bluegrass music did not start to grow in popularity until later. Aside from the old Grand Ole Opry broadcasts, the live Flatt and Scruggs TV shows during the 1950's and early 60's, and the Beverly Hillbillies theme song and the use of Foggy Mountain Breakdown in the Bonnie and Clyde movie, most people were simply not aware of bluegrass music. Except for limited airplay on local radio stations, mostly in the southeast, the music was not on the airwaves or in record stores. Bill Monroe and most of his contemporaries were generally unknown and barely making a living. An exception might have been Flatt and Scruggs, because they were Hollywood's "go-to" if they wanted to spice something up with what they considered to be "hillbilly music."

Gibson neither made not sold many mandolins after the mid 1920's. The instrument simply fell out of popularity for a very long time. By the time people started to become aware of the instruments again, largely because of projects like the "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" and "Old and In the Way" albums, Gibson had been bought by a company called Norlin. Norlin was primarily focused on making electric guitars, was building the worst acoustic guitars the company ever made, and was not the least bit interested in mandolins. In the front office, mandolins were probably viewed only as a peculiarity from the company's history if they thought about them at all.

When I was a kid during the 1960's, probably my only exposure to the mandolin was seeing Donna Stoneman bouncing up and down in a rare variety show appearance. I vaguely remember wondering "what is that little instrument she is playing?" Neither I nor anyone I knew had heard of Bill Monroe.

The mandolin slowly started to gain a little bit of interest later in the 1970's. Gibson's only response to the fledgling mandolin market was to offer a single Epiphone student model, and eventually to make a rather anemic attempt to redesign the by then poorly built F-5. They called it the redesigned instrument the F-5L, and put it into very limited production at a very stiff price.

Meanwhile, the Japanese started to catch on and started building mandolins in modest numbers, and then two US companies got started-- Flatiron and Unicorn. The only thing that really got Gibson back into to the mandolin market was the purchase of the nearly bankrupt company by Henry Juszciewicz and his partners. One day during the mid 1980's they noticed that Flatiron was starting to sell a lot of mandolins, and that they were better instruments than Gibson was making at the time. So they bought Flatiron, took over the factory, and gave Steve Carlson a job [for awhile].

The only thing that I'll add is that when I first started playing mandolin around 1979, the only new instruments that were available to me were imports. I bought a budget Korean mandolin for $40 and played it for a few months. It was a rather awful instrument, and when I was ready to move up, the only thing that I could find was an old Strad-o-lin that needed tuners and a tailpiece for $75. I still have that Strad-o-lin. I gave the Korean mandolin to a lady friend, and the top caved in on it a few months later. I assured her that it wasn't her fault, but I didn't think to buy her another mandolin. I wasn't too smart in those days.

I think the first time I played a Gibson mandolin was a couple of years later, when I was introduced to Norman Blake, who was not well known at the time. He invited me to play a tune on his black top A-4. Within a few seconds, a light went on: "Oh, this is what a mandolin is supposed to sound and feel like." So I started saving my pennies, and bought an F-4 for $1600 around 1987.

[Chris Gray]

Thanks for the replies! I am a huge Big Mon fan and completely understand all he has done for the F5 mandolin. That thought just crossed my mind when he said it.

I was born in the 70’s…when you watch documentaries about the old time they can paint a different picture in your head. Ken Burns “County Music” had me thinking EVERYONE was at their local music stores back in the 50’s when the Opry was at it’s peak.

It sounds like it was a super nice gesture on Gibsons part to put his two Loars back together an no cost. Especially after the way he treated them and, in reality, not making them a lot at on all on selling any F5’s.

I do understand that without Bill there might not be F5’s around today (besides the one’s built before bluegrass). Thank you Bill!

[allenhopkins]

+1 to what rcc56 said above. Gibson didn't "sell a lot of mandolins" ever, after about the time Bill Monroe started performing professionally in the late 1920'a. Through the 1930's and '40's Monroe was just a fairly popular country entertainer, with a slot on the Grand Ole Opry and a successful regional touring and recording career, as such things went for "hillbilly" musicians at the time. His stubborn and controlling personality, and his belief that the way he played country music was somehow better and purer than what some of his contemporaries did, kept him strictly acoustic (with a couple of Decca compromises) -- but his pre-1946 versions of the Blue Grass Boys, which included Wilene "Sally" Forester on accordion some of the time, and Dave "Stringbean" Akeman on clawhammer banjo, weren't what we'd call bluegrass now.

There's a lot of mythology around his assembly of the 1946 version of his band, which featured Earl Scruggs on banjo, Lester Flatt on guitar and vocals, and "Chubby" Wise on fiddle, plus Monroe and a bassist. The group wasn't together long -- Monroe was notorious for band-member turnover, adding and subtracting sidemen continually -- and the impression it made, mainly (though Monroe hated to admit it) due to Scruggs' innovative three-finger banjo style, engendered a lot of imitation from aspiring country musicians. But in terms of general popularity, it was still a regional style, not popular or widespread enough to strongly influence the musical instrument market. A helluva lot more country pickers were buying Gretsch semi-hollow guitars, or pedal steels, based on 1950's musical trends.

Bluegrass was enough like "folk" music, to get swept up in the Great Folk Scare of the late '50's-early 60's. I won't go into the Folk Music In Overdrive article in Esquire that many cite, but within a few years bluegrass bands were playing at colleges, young musicians in the Northeast and West Coast were buying Flatt & Scruggs albums and taking up the music, and there arose a demand for banjos, mandolins, Dobros, dreadnaught flat-top guitars, etc.

Which demand was largely met by Asian manufacturers, who began shipping clones of F-5's and Mastertones to the US in the 1970's. Gibson mandolins were scarcer than hen's teeth, and most of those on the market had been pulled out of closets or out from under beds, where Grandpa or Uncle Fred had left 'em. As noted above, Gibson made a belated effort to clean up its mandolin act, upgrading its pretty awful '60's-70's F-models by introducing the F-5L (which I would give higher marks than rcc56 does) purchasing Flatiron, and so on. But despite some very talented and committed luthiers working on Gibson mandolins in the years since, and despite other US makers (Collings, Weber) getting into the act and building mandolins in a commercial setting rather than individual shops, American manufacturers have only survived at the top end of the market -- as is true for many other types of musical instruments. The lower and middle ranges of the US acoustic instrument market are almost completely ceded to imports.

As someone who chased around trying to buy an F-5 in the 1970's, and only succeeded around 1980 in finding a '50's model, I found that, Bill Monroe or not, Gibson never committed to making mandolins in sufficient quantities and varieties, to satisfy the domestic demand that was largely sparked by bluegrass's popularity in the "folk music years." They have pretty much staked the company's future on the electric guitar -- and there are a thousand electric guitars bought in the US, at least, for every mandolin. Our mando-centric perspective makes us think that people should be buying more of them, but it is what it is.

[Bogle]

rcc56 and Allen made some great comments above! I will add that I too chased around for an F-5 in the 70's, only to find woefully substandard Gibsons from the 50's and 60's and no affordable newer Gibsons (with any modicum of tone!) from the 70's. So like many others did in that decade, I found a great sounding F-5 copy from an independent builder. Unlike today, there were very few sources for great mandolins.

[bgpete]

As Allen says, in the mid 60s the instrument that got the most attention from the new (college, northern) bluegrass audience was the banjo! Many record labels with bluegrass releases saw this and quickly added the phrase "with 5-string banjo!" to their record jackets. I remember a scramble to find playable 5-strings of almost any brand, not to mention the butchering of many old tenor banjos to convert them. The mandolin's popularity was quite far behind that of the banjo, and Gibson, despite being the only mandolin maker with any claim to bluegrass credibility, was slow to catch on, and took an eternity to produce decent mandolins in any quantity.
I'd be very interested to see a graph of Gibson's banjo production versus mandolin production from around 1960 to 1990.