I first met Paul Geremia at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck. Paul’s musical skills seemed to be complete even when he was a very young man: his guitar playing is incredibly versatile, his harmonica work exceptional, his singing and his writing stellar. We shared a love of twelve string guitar work that remains today, along with strong opinions about twelve string sound possibilities and the sources and nuances of those. Whenever we crossed paths, we always ended up talking twelves.
In 1979, Paul found an old Bruno six-string guitar, Brazilian rosewood back and sides and a ladder braced red spruce top and asked if i could remove the neck and top, replace the neck and tail blocks and do a twelve-string conversion. I jumped at the chance to take on the project. Two years later, the job done, my friend Eric Goodenough and I drove the resurrected now twelve string to Rhode Island to hand off to Paul. Everyone was happy, we said our goodbyes and drove home to New Hampshire. As fate would have it, that afternoon the guitar met a terrible fate sliding off the back seat, sans case, of Paul’s Dodge Dart. The ancient and thin Brazilian rosewood of the guitar’s body turned into toothpicks. I ended up using the neck and building a new body for it, but the original concept of the guitar was lost.
Some five years later I had a client ask for a new instrument which rang a distant bell and brought to mind Paul’s old project and we resurrected the body shape of the old Bruno as the basis for a jumbo twelve fret design. That first effort was extraordinary, and the design was added to the Froggy Bottom catalog immediately. We also used the shape as the basis for a twelve string design, often varying scale lengths widely for different musical styles.
A few years later we chose the B-12 shape as the basis for our most common Baritone six string design using a 27” scale. That design was something that Will Ackerman made an big impact with beginning in the latter ’90’s. Will’s sparse, tasteful use of a baritone combined with his ability to get so much out of a single note has singlehandedly made the design a noted design in our catalog.