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Research Library - Vintage Elger Guitars
Quick Facts:
The Elger brand name produced guitars between 1959 and approximately 1970. All genuine Elger guitars were made between these years, either in the USA or in Japan.
Elger acoustic guitars made between 1959 and 1964 were hand made in Harry Rosenblum's shop in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. No Elger electric guitars or basses were made in the USA.
From 1965 to approximately 1970, all Elger guitars were made at the Matsumoku factory in Japan by the Hoshino Gakki Gen company and imported to the US under the Elger brand name. These included both electric and acoustic guitars as well as electric basses bearing the Elger name. They were quality made, affordable instruments.
Elger was the first US company to mass-import Japanese-made guitars to the US market (in 1965), and Elger transitioned its brand to become Ibanez USA for most of its imported guitars around the same time. This marked a start of a trend that eventually led to the famous Gibson lawsuit, and Ibanez (as Elger) was the respondent in the case.
The majority of the guitars imported by this company from 1965+ were under the Ibanez brand name. The company did continue the Elger brand on some of these imports in a limited quantity until the name was phased out in approximately 1970.
Today, Elger guitars are harder to find on the vintage market than Ibanez models made during the same timeframe, as far fewer of them were made under that brand. Japanese-made Elger models remain affordable and represent a perfect example of quality made yet affordable vintage guitars.
Pre-1965 US-made acoustic Elgers can fetch much higher prices on the vintage market due to their top-tier quality level, scarcity, and were likely to be hand-made by Rosenblum himself or the Muller brothers, the German luthiers he hired to develop the line. These are far less common on today's market than the Japanese variety.
History of Elger
In the 1950’s, the post-WWII era saw a boom in popularity of simple music centered around an acoustic guitar, banjo, and bass. Groups such as the Limelighters, the Weavers, and the Kingston Trio were popular and by the early 1960’s, the music trend produced an explosion of demand for acoustic guitars (CRAVE Guitars, 2018). Artists such as Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, their contemporaries exposed the masses to the possibilities with a guitar and a voice (Westman Jams, 2019). This simple idea appealed widely to the “common folk,” who embraced their own musical outlets on front porches and community centers across the nation and gave birth to the style known as “Folk Music.”
In 1954, Harry Rosenblum opened a music store in Bryn Mawr, PA and business was good. Guitars were selling so fast that manufacturers couldn’t keep up with demand. The major producers such as Martin, Gibson, Harmony, and Guild ramped up production, which naturally resulted in shortcuts on quality. The result was a crop of guitars that were declining in value (Westman Jams, 2019). Rosenblum decided that he could manufacture his own acoustic guitars at a better quality than he was seeing from Martin at the time. He named his company “Elger” after the names of his two children, Ellen (EL) and Gerson (GER) (Westman Jams, 2019).
Rosenblum made the first Elger guitars himself in 1959, and quickly discovered he needed help to reach the production levels he planned. He hired a pair of brothers, Karl and Georg Muller, who were German violin luthiers and together they designed and built quality guitars that rivaled even Martin until 1964 (Benedittini, 2024).
While these original Elger guitars produced in Pennsylvania up to that point were superb instruments, Rosenblum was realizing that the cost of production was resulting in retail prices that exceeded his dream of affordable, quality guitars to his customers. Around the same time in Japan, manufacturers such as Matsumoku were enjoying their own boom of guitar popularity in Asia, but were not importing their guitars to the U.S. market. Rosenblum saw the quality of their manufacturing and was impressed by their (significantly) lower production costs.
In 1965, Elger ceased production of U.S.-made guitars and contracted with the Hoshino Gakki Gen company to become the first importing Japanese-made guitars to the U.S. To avoid the residual post-WWII stigma against all things Japan at the time, Rosenblum adopted a brand name for these imports from a small Spanish guitar company also owned by Hashino Gakki Gen – Ibanez (AcousticMusic.org, 2023).
This was the first partnership to import Japanese guitars by an American company into the U.S. market, a trend that soon explode in popularity. These guitars were largely electric in correlation to the surge in popularity brought on by groups like Led Zeppelin and others of the rock movement in the 1960s, especially Ibanez models similar to Gibson’s Les Paul design. This later led directly to the famous “lawsuit” and the current market for “Lawsuit Guitars.”
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Aside from the Ibanez branded imports, Rosenblum also imported Japanese-made acoustic guitars branded under the original Elger name from the time U.S. production ceased in 1965 until the brand was discontinued in approximately 1970 (AcousticMusic.org, 2023).
Bibliography
AcousticMusic.org. (2023, January 27). Ibanez “Lawsuit” & Elger Guitars - Acoustic Music. Acoustic Music. https://acousticmusic.org/research/guitar-information/large-shop-guitar-builders/ibanez-lawsuit-elger-guitars/
Benedittini, F. (2024, January 3). The true story of lawsuit guitars. Vintage Japan Guitars. https://vintagejapanguitars.com/the-true-story-of-lawsuit-guitars/
CRAVE Guitars. (2018). Elger. CRAVE Guitars. https://www.craveguitars.co.uk/tag/elger/
Elger Guitars: This company may have vanished but it’s instruments remain. (2019, July 16).