The National guitar was invented by John Dopera, a Slovak immigrant, in Los Angeles in the mid-1920s. The culmination of the Art Deco movement embodied in a musical instrument, these silver guitars also boasted many features which made them objects of desire for musicians: they were considerably louder than wooden-bodied acoustic guitars, their mirror-like nickel plating made them visually stunning, they were much more durable and they had a unique tone, thanks to the novel arrangement of three aluminium ‘speaker’ cones inside the body.
They were quickly adopted by the Hawaiian guitarists on the West Coast of America, then by blues players all the way from Mississippi to Chicago. Until Adolph Rickenbacher, a superintendent at the National factory, went off and invented the electric guitar, they were the instrument of choice for many working musicians, whether they played on street corners, in jazz clubs, in the big swing bands or in the makeshift recording studios which captured their unique sound on 78 rpm shellac records.
When the depression hit in the late ‘twenties, National were already diversifying into cheaper materials and different types of instruments, including steel-bodied tenor guitars, plectrum guitars, mandolins and ukuleles. Wooden-bodied resonator guitars were also being made and a new variant, the Dobro, became popular among bluegrass, Cajun and country players.
In its brief fourteen years of existence, the National company produced hundreds of models of instruments in dozens of finishes. They have become rarities and highly collectable – a top-of-the-range tricone guitar from the late ‘twenties, with its extravagant chrysanthemum engraving, now sells for more than $25,000. And in a delayed tribute to John Dopera’s talent and inventiveness, dozens of companies, from the Czech Republic to China, are now manufacturing resonator instruments at prices which, perhaps for the first time since 1942, make them available and attractive to beginners and experienced players alike.