Pub Genius...

Pub Genius: Ha ha ha! Yes, an early ‘60s Kay ‘Red Devil’.

Pub Genius: An interesting maker — one of the two great Chicago mass-producers, along with Harmony.

Pub Genius: Blood of your first-born and a 1000-year lease on your immortal soul?

Pub Genius: Ah! So Stoat & Vinegar are back in stock again! I wonder how that public health inspector is getting on? Legs... so fragile, really... like two little matchsticks...

Pub Genius: Chicago in the 1890s was a real powerhouse of industry — not least in music. It was one of the places to be as the 20th century dawned and it was where a lot of the musical instrument businesses were based — including a small mandolin maker called the Groehsl Company. It had been formed in 1890 but by 1921 it had become the altogether more impressive sounding Stromberg-Voisinet Company.

Pub Genius: ‘Good’ and ‘Kay’ don’t always fit in the same sentence without a ‘not’ getting in between them, but they were... acceptable.

Pub Genius: That was after Henry Kay ‘Hank’ Kuhrmeyer, but the company didn’t get renamed until 1931 — long after it had begun churning out Mayflower guitars and mandolins, and archtops called Strombergs.

Pub Genius: Well, yes, but Kay did have one claim to fame. In 1934 they introduced an ‘amplified guitar’. Some have said this makes it one of the first to have tried to tame the electron.

Pub Genus: Almost nothing. It can’t have been very good as it didn’t set the world on fire, and opinion seems to suggest it didn’t have a magnetic pickup but a transducer to amplify vibrations from the top. It came with an amp, though, by all accounts — though you hate to think what it would have been like! That said, the company were pretty innovative at the time and had a model with an adjustable bridge (wild stuff for the early 1930s!), and they even introduced a string bass.

Pub Genius: The company were, after 1931, and they were sold as Kay guitars by the mid to late 1930s — but they were also sold under a multitude of other names, like most of the other big US guitar brands.

Pub Genius: This was the heyday of the Sears catalogue and its imitators, and Kay sold shedloads of instruments under Sears & Roebuck’s various brand names, like Silvertone. They also made for Montgomery Ward and are even said to have made guitars for Gretsch in the ‘30s.

Pub Genius: Hard to say, but one source says they employed over 100 workers in the 1940s and were making as many as 300 instruments a day — so that was pretty impressive!

Pub Genius: Opinions differ. Some claim they were halfway between Harmony and Gibson in quality — others suggest that’s more than a little flattering. But they were serious makers, supplying any number of starter guitars and more importantly, in the 1950s, becoming a bit of a Chicago Blues legend.

Pub Genius: How about Jimmy Reed and Hubert Sumlin?

Pub Genius: Jimmy Reed’s was the K-161 Thin Twin semi-acoustic.

Pub Genius: Yes — and a very weird one. In 1956 the legendary jazz guitarist Barney Kessel signed a deal with Kay to produce a range of guitars that he would endorse. This was a major bid to move up-market and it was reasonably successful, given Kessel’s eminence. They made three models and they were nice guitars, as you’d expect — though they also gave rise to the ‘Kelvinator’ headstock tag.

Pub Genius: They had garish plastic headstocks with an oversized ‘K’ on them. People said they looked like the ‘Kelvinator’ signs on Sears’ fridges.

Pub Genius: Only until he defected to Gibson three years later but, yes, the association helped Kay’s image. In fact the brand really hit their stride in the late 1950s and ‘60s, and especially after ‘64, when they moved into a 100,000-square-foot factory where they employed a staggering 500 workers who were producing up to 1500 guitar per day!

Pub Genius: Well, you can thank the Beatles for the boom and the Japanese for the decline, I’m afraid. Demand was so great after ’64 that quality began to suffer (not that it had been that wonderful beforehand!) and when demand began to slacken around 1965, Kay really felt the pinch. In fact, in that year they were sold to Seeburg, the jukebox manufacturers, but two years later they tossed it, like a hot potato, to Valco (which had once been National and National-Dobro). But by 1968 the party was really over and the Kay name was soon auctioned off, eventually destined to haunt the guitar business like a ghost, appearing on a succession of Far Eastern-made clones and copies ever since.

Pub: genius: Oh, that was in a catalogue I saw once. An early ‘60s double-cutaway semi, which curiously, it turned out, a certain Mr Clapton was also attracted to. The earliest pictures show him using one in his first band, the Roosters.

Pub Genius: Kays had their problems — horrible necks for the most part; big and lumpy, prone to warping, badly set and with crumbling bindings. All the same, they had a charm and a sound and were far better than most European guitars of the era. But the Red Devil was no match for a contemporary Gretsch, that’s for sure. Still, they made guitars that helped a million youngsters learn to play who couldn’t afford an Epiphone or a Gibson or a Guild — they had a tacky charm, a bit like an old ‘50s Chevy.