I even looked inside with a light and automotive mirror. There are no labels or serial numbers or stamps or any other identifying marks anywhere that I can find. The inside is lined with a black fabric-like material. The tuning plates are secured with three screws - everything else I'm finding that looks vaguely similar has 5 screws. The shape of the pick guard seems common among Lyon & Healy in the early 1900s as well, but I have yet to find one with the same inlay pattern. The cloud-style base plate in general seems common from the early 1900s but has a small hole in the center not seen on most examples. It's possible these were replaced during the minor restoration, but they seem to have an "old" character. The tuning pegs are odd I have yet to see another example that are solid black. I've scoured the internet for a couple days, and the most I can determine is that it appears to be a Lyons & Healy with some characteristics of an American Conservatory. So if it was his, this mandolin would have to be from 1891 at the very latest. He was born in 1844 and died young, even for that time, at 47 in 1891. Now I'm wondering if it was even his mandolin at all. I recently decided to try to find out the real history behind this, and quickly determined that there weren't any "American" mandolins during that period. The Civil War stories I heard as a kid got mixed up with the mandolin, and for a long time I envisioned him having this mandolin during the war. This was supposedly my great-great-grandfather's mandolin. My great-grandmother, sometime in her 90s, scrawled "Nancy" on it (see photo), because she wanted that granddaughter to have it.
Unfortunately very soon the left side of the face also cracked (see photos), and it became largely unplayable again. I "played" it for probably a couple years, mostly making up tunes on my own and maybe working out some small mandolin bits from Led Zeppelin. You can see the repaired crack on the right side, and I think he shimmed up the bridge.
We (my parents) had it marginally restored. I received this mandolin in college because I played the guitar. Their first daughter, my grandmother, was born in 1906. She was 96 when she died, and it was somewhere around that time. I'm not sure if she passed away that year, or went into a nursing home and relatives dispersed her possessions. I inherited this mandolin from my great-grandmother in 1979. You've probably seen variations of this story a thousand times, but here goes.įirst, the facts.
0 kommentar(er)
