My life changed immeasurably in many ways when I began working in a boatyard in Connecticut in my pre-teen years. I made friendships there which would last my entire life. I was introduced to the highest levels of woodworking craftsmanship I would ever know, and I was introduced to the Blues. Much of this came through my friendship with John C. Miller of Branford, CT, who brought an ancient Garrard turntable into our workspace and began playing music which awakened me to many of the finest blues players ever known. Blind Willie Johnson, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Robert Johnson all were new to me on my first day on that job. But the man who just stopped me in my tracks was Reverend Gary Davis. In 1960 Reverend Davis came to New Haven, CT to play; after that life was never the same. Living only a couple hours from where “The Reverend” lived in NYC, I was able to travel there when my friend John got his drivers license. The legendary $5 lessons from Rev. Davis were open ended, If you were attentive and patient, you got to stay as long as you liked, and the Reverend was a very, very deep well, both musically and as a man.
Rev. Davis’s preferred guitar was a Gibson J-200. I can’t begin to imagine how many of those guitars Gibson sold because of youngsters like myself who were so taken with Davis’s playing. It didn’t take long to realize that having a J-200 on my lap was not going to let me play like Rev. Davis. In hindsight, I’d easily acknowledge that the average J-200 of those times was not a very good sounding guitar. Those that I heard in the Reverend’s hands, however, were incredible. The effect of all this was that in my early and formative years as a young player, the J-200 became something of an ideal to me of what a guitar should look like and was capable of sounding like.
This shape became very popular when we began to experiment with using it with a shallower body depth, anywhere from 3 1/2’ to 4” deep. Two koa/German spruce versions of that design in the hands of singer-songwriters Louise Taylor and Scott Ainslie brought many new clients to our door.
I have owned two ’30’s era Gibsons, one a Brazilian rosewood SJ-200 and one a Mahogany SJ-100, which had a very long 26” scale length. The SJ-100 sounded incredible, but was a monster to play due to its scale length. The SJ-200 was amazing to play, completely mesmerizing to look at and sounded truly terrible, muddy enough to sound as if filled with cotton candy. Ah, well…you can’t win ‘em all…
Once I had established Froggy Bottom in the 1970’s, I took my time in getting to the point of wanting to build a version of the J-200. It’s a design that we have tweaked quite a lot in all kinds of ways over the last forty-five years. It is still our most popular true jumbo design, 17” across the lower bout, and I would still say that visual familiarity with variations of Gibson’s iconic L-5 tells me that the shape is really what a guitar is supposed to look like to my eye. My own favorite personal guitar is a 2011 Model G of fiddleback mahogany and Adirondack. It roars and it whispers with equal conviction, and it has THAT SHAPE! We’ve been able to make its voice much more balanced by varying body depth, and decades of tweaking the design for players with different needs has made the development of the design’s possibilities endless fun.