Lyon & healey octave mandolin ?

[bluesmandolinman]

A friend bought this instrument 15 years ago from a music shop in Germany. It has no markings anywhere.

He was told it is a Lyon & Healey Octave mandolin from the 1920´s. Can anyone confirm this information ?

overall length is 96,5 cm
scale is 62 cm

I have seen many bowlbacks and the famous A,B, C Style archtop mandolins by L&H but never such a octave mandolin.

Any help is apreciated.
René

[bluesmandolinman]

another picture

[bluesmandolinman]

last one

[Jim Garber]

L&H sold similar instruments pictured in my 1913 catalog under the Leland brand. Is this a flatback? I will post a scan later this evening.

There are no specs in the catalog as to scale length but it does have a similar look tho it is called a mandocello. 62 cm converts to 24.4 inches which could easily be a mandocello scale.

Jim

[Jim Garber]

Here is my Leland tenor mandolin and mandocello page from my 1912-13 Lyon & Healy catalog.

The tenor mando (mandola) has the cutout in the headstock like yours but the mandocello has the circular soundhole but a different pickguard.

Jim

[Jim Garber]

Actually what is interesting about yours is that the pickguard bearsa resemblance to those on Washburn mandolins of the period tho cut in half. Very unusual.

Jim

[bluesmandolinman]

Jim, thank you very much for your help.Yes it is a flatback. I was really hoping you have some informations because for all non Gibson questions YOU are the expert.

Thanks again
René

[Jim Garber]

I don't know about that but I try to learn as much as I can about instruments, esp those I own. The Leland instruments were of interest because I have a std and a piccolo. They were meant to be used in mandolin emsembles and the guitars were made with a shallow depth for some reason (balance of sound?)

Jim

[Paul Hostetter]

I've seen a few of the shallow guitars, but made by the Larson Brothers, and they were for playing lap-style Hawaiian. Here's a photo I found in a junk shop in Detroit:



And here's a detail of just the guitars.



Notice how high the action is. There are other interesting details: flat headstock, nice purfling, huge soundhole, rather Washburnesque bridge. The other guitar is clearly an L&H item, notice the tailpiece.

I think Bennie Nawahi played one of these. I converted one, labeled Maurer, from Hawaiian to Spanish and played another that had already had that conversion done and wow, they were both amazing guitars.

So were the Leland guitars like this?

[Jim Garber]

According to the intro section of the Leland instruments in my catalog, the guitars were 2 inches deep and with larger soundholes ostensibly for projection purposes.

Here is the first guitar page.

Jim

[Jim Garber]

Here is a side view of all of the Leland family.

Jim

[keef]

I've never seen any of the guitar mandos pictured in Jim's catalog, but I do have pictures of three surviving LH Leland thinline guitars that are identical to the one in Paul Hostetter's photo. You can see part of the 'Brilliantone' label through the soundhole.

[brunello97]

Amazing image, Jim. I like the photo/drawing montage-very strange foreshortening in the perspective. And especially the ensemble photo set into the drawn picture frame (long before Magritte, I bet.) Photoshop has nothing on those guys....

So, Rene, what do you think? Is it a match? (Also, is it odd to see a fretboard dot on the 9th?

Paul, do you have any further information on the Detroit ensemble?

And finally, Keef, how goes the Washburn book? Progress with publication?

thanks to all,

Mick

[bluesmandolinman]

my friend commented that the neck is very thick as if it was build to withstand the tension of heavier strings.... therefore it seems that it actually is a mandocello ( even if it looks different from the one pictured in Jim´s catalog )

a dot at the 9th fret is strange indeed... I don´t have a clue about the reason

René

[Paul Hostetter]

Are you talking about an instrument with six strings? The one they say is strung and played like an ordinary guitar? If that's what they intended, the 9th fret dot is no surprise.

Mick, I have no information about that band, sorry to say - nothing on the back or anything. I just found it in a bin of old photos a long time ago when I still lived there. I can see from all the information brought out here that it's not a Larson brothers thing at all, though I am quite certain another one I saw before I found that photo was, it had a Maurer label in it. Now that I think of it, the Maurer label didn't necessarily mean the Larsons made it, I simply assumed that and could be mistaken about the maker of even that first one. Alas, that was all more than 30 years ago. If I had access to a functioning time machine, I'd probably take it back to Chicago and hang out at L&H. It must have been amazing.

[bluesmandolinman]

Are you talking about an instrument with six strings? The one they say is strung and played like an ordinary guitar? If that's what they intended, the 9th fret dot is no surprise.

No, I was referring to the mandocello.
Though I posted the pictures I didn´t even noticed that little detail before Mick mentioned it.

So we have a 8 string mandocello (most probably) with dots like on a guitar... makes it even more complicated to determine what it really is... or just a luthier mistake ( wrong position of that dot... 9th instead of 10th fret which would be correct for a m´cello) ?

btw Paul, I like the time machine idea

[Paul Hostetter]

Ah, now I scrolled far enough to see what you were talking about. 10th makes the most sense, of course, and the catalog page Jim posted shows one there.

Ya never know why some things happen. Bob Brozman has a Weissenborn with a dot at the 13th. Ooops!