From The Chinery Collection

Bigsby Double Neck
Paul Bigsby
Downey, California
1952

This Paul Bigsby guitar, custom-made for country singer Grady Martin, has a standard six-string neck coupled with a five-string mandolin neck.

Bigsby, a pattern maker and motorcyclist from California, is best known for making one of the first solid-body electric guitars—for country star Merle Travis—and later for his popular line of pedal-steel guitars. Country musicians were avid players of electric guitars from the earliest days of their manufacture.